Tiredness is Not a Virtue

And resting is not sinful—a reminder I needed this summer

Earlier this summer, I had a realization. I was tired. Not just physically and mentally tired, but existentially tired, somehow. I was tired of existing in a state that had felt like all rush, constant hustle, unending obligations, for the last ten years—since I moved to Ithaca to teach at Cornell in 2013. The tenure clock. Papers and books. A baby. The pandemic. 

I needed to rest. And with that need came guilt—and a modest personal reckoning that helped me to get over it. I have been sleeping a lot. I haven’t been writing much of anything. I have been doing boring forms of self-care like going to the dentist. As well as engaging in a lot of small activities that feel piecemeal and unimportant and, even, self-indulgent.

To do all of this, I had to remind myself, first of all, that tiredness is not a virtue. There is nothing inherently valuable in constantly wearing yourself out and doing the most you can to achieve your goals or even, to some extent, to live up to your values. True, oftentimes, we simply don’t have the luxury of taking a break from rushing. There is an incredible amount of privilege in being in a position to pull back even a little bit, even for a short while. But still, if you’re lucky enough to be able to, as I have for the first time in a decade, why not take advantage? 

Illustration by Piyapong Saydaung

Sometimes it helps me to remind myself that the more I pull back now, the better I’ll be able to put myself out there when my next book comes out in January. This one is close to my heart, and I find myself longing now more than ever to connect with readers and other thinkers and activists working in fat liberation spaces. I want to make myself available, for events and interviews and conversations (should I be lucky enough to be invited to have them). And I know that that means conserving energy while I can. (By the way, considering UNSHRINKING for a book club? I’d be delighted to zoom in if I can possibly schedule it. Reach out and I bet we can figure out some arrangement!)

(While I’m noting things parenthetically, please consider pre-ordering, if you haven’t already. Now more than ever, books live and die by pre-orders. And the possibility of my continuing to publish books like this one depends very much on sales figures. Can you tell I’m feeling the pressure?)

Anyway. What have I been doing in my quest to give myself a little bit of respite in the run-up to publication?

·       I cleaned up the house with my lovely husband. I’m persuaded by Virginia Sole-Smith’s idea that home organization is a hobby more than a care necessity, and Anne Helen Petersen’s point that organizing your fridge is not fun. But! It is soothing, especially in a house in which a very adorable and rambunctious three-year-old is constantly creating chaos. (On domestic forms of self-care, among others, I’ve been listening to KC Davis’s excellent new podcast, “Struggle Care,” with great appreciation.)

·       I took two brief trips, to Saratoga Springs (for a wonderful conversation with Virginia at Northshire Books) and to meet with my publishing team in NYC. So much fun! I’ve only just resumed traveling recently, and am looking forward to again savoring well-ventilated restaurant meals and gloriously vacant hotel rooms if anyone wants to invite me to do anything around my book’s publication next January. 

·       I have been enjoying lovely local activities, with my daughter and husband, and also occasionally, gloriously, by myself. The pool. (I wore a bathing suit in public for the first time in over 20 years. It was fine!) Ice cream. Raspberry picking. Blueberry picking. Making the resulting berries into cake for friends who needed a little comfort or cheering up or whatever. The carousel at our favorite park. I feel ridiculously lucky to live in a place I love year-round, including in the summer. 

·       I’ve been loving me some good TV. The second season of Somebody Somewhere delighted (fat representation done right! As in, fat bodies barely remarked upon—not to mention, trans characters portrayed sensitively and richly). And the second season of The Bear is an extraordinary combination of A plus food porn, gritty restaurant scenery, and family drama so poignant it left me almost breathless. 

·       I started a new, non-anonymous Instagram account. Follow me for mediocre pictures of cute animals and the occasional piece of book content.

·       I’ve been leaning, for the first time, into feminist and intersectional and neurodiversity-affirming and anti-fatphobic romance novels. Helen Hoang! Jasmine Guillory! Talia Hibbert! I’m charmed and enamored. Could it be a hint of internalized misogyny that previously made me slightly hesitant about this genre?

·       I saw the Barbie movie. I expected to have a lot to say about it, but to my surprise, I didn’t. As a movie, it’s excellent! It was as feminist and intersectional as it could possibly be, given the funding source and the scale of it. As a cultural product and measured by its likely consequences, it’s highly problematic! (What’s the bet that the aesthetic of “stereotypical Barbie” will outlast the earnest, effective feminist messaging of the film, or even its impeccable, hilarious satirizing of Kendom aka fragile masculinity.) I agree with Jessica DeFino that you can’t separate out the politics from the aesthetics here, if anywhere. And I agree with every one of my feminist, progressive Facebook friends who reported finding the movie hugely enjoyable. I’m sitting with the tensions here—especially as someone highly concerned with body politics and the cult of thinness—and letting myself just feel them.*

·       So much sleep. I can’t even tell you how good that’s been. My summer of rest and relaxation is unapologetically sleep-centric.

I owe all of the above to a couple of things. First, the insight, which I owe to Tricia Hersey of the Nap Ministry among many others, that we feel bad about being unproductive largely because of unfettered capitalism and ableism and white supremacy and a whole host of other pernicious, intersecting systemic forces. Hersey’s book’s eponymous notion of “rest as resistance” is a mantra I find as helpful as it is soothing. Indispensable analyses of the phenomenon of burnout, by Emily and Amelia Nagoski, as well as Anne Helen Petersen, are further essential reading here.

Second, on a more prosaic note, and somewhat contradictorily, I owe my ability to relax a bit to having the privilege of enough childcare for pretty much the first time ever—we simply didn’t have childcare until about a year ago, due to our COVID-cautious household ethos. Now, my daughter is in a summer school program, and we have a fabulous babysitter who comes a few afternoons a week too. On the latter score, would that everyone had the privilege to pay fairly for care of the kind which all parents of young children need, for too many reasons to list, and which remains all too elusive in the misogynistic, mother-exploitative, late-stage capitalist America brilliantly analyzed by Angela Garbes. Unfortunately, the forces holding us back as women are not just fragile men, but systemic forms of inequality: differential labor expectations, male caregiving apathy, the “caremongering” inflicted on women, and the way both white men and white women exploit poor Black and brown women for cheap childcare labor that perpetuates this whole toxic, racist mess in ways both intelligible and unforgiveable. Just for starters. But that’s another story, and I own that it is not entirely fair to have expected the Barbie movie to have tackled it.

Well, that’s it for now from me. How has your summer been going, friends? Have you had any time to rest (I ask hopefully)? If so, do you too need a reminder that rest is just rest—neither sinful nor slovenly and, sometimes, vital?

* It’s also possible my enjoyment of the film was colored by the fact that I got to enjoy it in a half-empty movie theater alone, while eating ice cream and popcorn with double butter, for a matinee while said wonderful babysitter was looking after my kid. Bliss! And something I haven’t gotten to enjoy since I became a parent and the pandemic hit shortly thereafter—I haven’t been to the movies since 2019, and I’ve never been solo, somehow. Highly recommended.