You’ve heard the phrase "rest is resistance." But nowadays, does it feel like just a catchy tagline for a graphic tee?
You've seen it: the pastel Instagram tile. The wellness influencer filming her eucalyptus shower. The corporate Slack channel encouraging everyone to "unplug this weekend," sent at 9:47 PM on a Friday, by a manager who won't stop emailing.
The phrase came from Tricia Hersey. She founded The Nap Ministry in 2016, out of a very specific tradition: Black women's exhaustion under a country that has always demanded more labor from them and offered less in return. When she said rest was resistance, she meant it against a specific machine; one that treated Black bodies as engines to be run until they broke.
She wasn't talking about your Peloton.
If you're a child of immigrants (or the grandchild, or the great-grandchild of anyone who came here and got told they had to work twice as hard for half as much) rest carries a particular weight. Your family's American story was probably built on not stopping. Two jobs. Night classes. The store staying open on Christmas. The bodega, the salon, the restaurant that never closed. Grandma who worked until she couldn't walk. Dad who slept four hours a night for a decade so you could sleep eight.
To rest, in that context, can feel like betrayal. Like undoing what they did.
Here's where the wellness industry got right: it took Hersey's radical framing and sold it back to us as permission. Rest isn't giving up: it's resistance. You're not lazy; you're decolonizing your time. Buy the mushroom coffee. Book the sound bath. You're not failing your family. You're healing.
Sometimes resting genuinely is a political act. Reclaiming your Sunday is the closest you'll get this year to saying no to a system that wants you as fuel.
But sometimes you're just tired.
Not tired in a way that means anything. Not tired because you're absorbing generational trauma or resisting capitalism or protesting on behalf of your ancestors. Just good old tired because you worked a lot. Because your body is a body. Because you're a human and humans need to lie down.
And that has to be okay too.
If every nap has to be radical and every closed laptop has to be a political statement, then you haven't escaped the grind. You've just added a moral performance to it. Now you're not just working, you're working and being profoundly meaningful about your not-working. That's exhausting in a whole new way.
The trick is holding both truths at once. Hersey is right: for a lot of us, in a lot of contexts, choosing rest is a genuine refusal of a system that would prefer we run ourselves into the ground. And also, sometimes rest is not political or a reclamation. Sometimes rest is just Wednesday afternoon and you're on the couch and there is nothing philosophical about it.
The immigrant kid version of this looks something like: you can honor what your family did without repeating it. You can be grateful for the sacrifice without treating your own body as the site of a similar one. The point of them working that hard was, arguably, so you didn't have to. Living inside their labor as a permanent debt is not the tribute they were building toward.
You are allowed to rest. Not because it's radical, because you're a person, and people rest.
Sometimes rest is resistance. Sometimes rest is rest.
Both are yours.