Rest as Resistance, Rest as Liberation

Dear Community,  

“If we are not resting, we will not make it. I need us to make it.” – Tricia Hersey  

This week marks five years since the COVID-19 shutdowns and leads us into LGBTQ Health Awareness Week. Amidst the grief of this anniversary, I’m thinking about the lessons we’ve learned—or failed to learn—about care, about rest, about what it means to sustain both our health and our movement.  

We are only halfway through Trump’s first 100 days, and already, our community is under attack. One bill tracker has mapped over 575 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills across 47 states. Rights and freedoms stripped away. Trans lives put in jeopardy. The onslaught is meant to keep us exhausted, to burn us out, to pile onto the already-exhausting and very real mental and physical health impacts of the minority stress of simply being LGBTQIA+ people in the world. It is about breaking us, so we will stop fighting back.  

Which means that rest is not just recovery. Rest is resistance. Rest is survival. Rest is liberation.  

When we talk about rest as resistance, we are drawing from Black women writers like Tricia Hersey, Cole Arthur Riley, and Audre Lorde. When we talk about rest as liberation and survival, we are carrying forward the work of disability justice leaders like Stacey Park Milbern, Alice Wong, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha – Asian and South Asian women and nonbinary femmes leaders who remind us that sustaining our bodies is part of sustaining our movements.

To be clear, I write this not as an expert – my wife would be the first to tell you that I am at best a work in progress here. If you, too, read this and think, “Yes, but I can’t possibly rest; too many people need me, there’s too much to do,” welcome to the club. So many of us struggle to embrace rest. We wear exhaustion like a badge of honor, convinced that stepping back means letting others down. Unlearning exhaustion as a badge of honor is hard. Learning to value rest as a birthright, not a luxury or a privilege, is harder. But it is vital. For our health. For our movement. For our survival.

In 1988, while battling cancer, Audre Lorde reminded us: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” But what comes before those words matters just as much: “I had to examine, in my dreams as well as in my immune-function tests, the devastating effects of overextension. Overextending myself is not stretching myself.” I think, too, about Cole Arthur Riley’s words: “Let rest deliver you back to yourself. Exhaustion won’t save you in a world more interested in using your body than protecting it. Lie down. Breathe slow. We rest that we might dream.” 

The attacks on our rights will not stop. The work will not stop. The need will not stop. But neither will we. And if we are to keep going, we must commit—not just to fighting, not just to organizing, not just to caring for our communities—but to caring for ourselves.  

We have an obligation to fight. We have an obligation to care for our people. AND we have an obligation to rest. Not just so we can keep going. Not just so we can keep fighting. But simply because we deserve it. Because it is our birthright. Because exhaustion is not our legacy.  

Our legacy is care.  

Our legacy is rest.  

With solidarity and rest,  

Jen LaBarbera (they/them)

Director of Education & Advocacy

PS: As an organizer trained as a librarian, you know I love a book rec list! Start here: 1) Rest Is Resistance – Tricia Hersey, 2) Black Liturgies – Cole Arthur Riley, 3) Care Work – Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, 4) A Burst Of Light – Audre Lorde (+ bonus tip: get these from your local library or from your local independent bookstore!)