Dylan Boyer recently decided it was once again time to get into his art studio. The 32-year-old Minnesota resident, who also happens to be the director of development at The Aliveness Project, the state’s largest HIV/AIDS social service agency, needed a creative outlet. Returning to his practice as a maker of stained glass, after three years away, was the answer.
“I haven’t had the time or energy for it,” he told TheBody. But, during this particularly hostile political climate, he’s found that creating art is now an even more essential tool in his routine. “That’s what rest looks like. It has nothing to do with the outside world—it has everything to do with me.”
Boyer’s definition of rest is in line with the origins of the idea of “self-care,” a term that gets thrown around more than lightly nowadays. However, self-care has much less to do with consumerist tendencies, such as purchasing face masks or going to an expensive spa, than one might think from current discussions of the topic. Much of its origins lie in civil rights and feminist organizing.
“Anyone who is interested in making change in the world also has to learn to take care of himself, herself, theirself,” Black feminist activist and philosopher Angela Davis said in a 2018 interview with AfroPunk.
In that same interview, Davis mentioned that many famous civil rights activists were engaged in a form of generative and restorative self-care. Former Black Panther Ericka Huggins taught herself yoga and meditation, and, just recently, a picture of icon Rosa Parks engaged in a bow pose made the rounds in traditional media.
“The fact that she did yoga does not at all contradict the other things that I know about her,” Brenna Greer, associate professor of history at Wellesley College, told CNN in response to the picture. “She was often taking care of herself.”
In these acts of self-care, some might hear resonances of Audre Lorde’s infamous decree — written in her book “A Burst of Light,” a series of essays and journal entries “discussing her struggle with breast cancer — that “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
People are pushed to become activists
That sense of preservation is one that many in the AIDS community feel now as the Trump administration has already demolished an infrastructure for global AIDS relief that took decades to build and maintain. Every day, a new news story about potential cuts to lifesaving social safety-net programs such as Medicaid sends many organizers, activists, people living with HIV, and people of marginalized identities into a panic.
That right-wing strategy is known as “flood the zone” — an attempt to overwhelm activists, as well as everyday Americans, into a stunned inactivity. The tactic began early in Trump’s presidency, as he unleashed a flood of executive orders that ended birthright citizenship, banned gender transitions for people under the age of 19, and pardoned the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
Several people in the AIDS community have felt overwhelmed by the strategy, including PrEP4All executive director Jeremiah Johnson. He said in an email to TheBody that Shel Silverstein’s poem, “How to Eat a Whale” — “She took little bites and she chewed very slow,” the poet writes—has served as a reminder for how to approach such a feeling. “I have to remain focused on what I can achieve on any given day,” he said.
Activist and TheBody contributor Mark S. King even wrote about this feeling on his award-winning blog, “My Fabulous Disease.”
“The trauma — there’s no other word for it, really — of the last few months continues to weigh heavily on my psyche and my energy level,” he wrote. “Just as this administration clearly planned, the events are happening faster than I can process them. I have been thrown back on my heels.” King also wrote about feelings of “self-conscious guilt” he has felt while staying on the sidelines as people he knows have taken to the streets.
Of course, taking to the streets is not the only way to be part of activism. While going out and marching is intense for the body, there are many areas of activism that require even more labor. Organizing is hard; it requires navigating social and emotional relationships, corralling people together, scheduling, working with government officials, working against government officials, spreading the word about gatherings, and more. It can be an unpaid full-time job, on top of any other paid work a person might do.
“Activism is work — and many people don’t understand that,” said Beto Pérez, a visual artist and organizer living with HIV in Tlaxcala, Mexico. “You need to be available all the time.”
Thinking about activism as work often contradicts people’s conceptions of reformers and protesters. They do it, in popular lore, because they believe in a higher cause. And while activists often do work to enact change for a larger purpose, that doesn’t mean that activism is not hard work.
“People don’t want to be activists,” Pérez said. “People are pushed to be activists because situations are hard and they need to do something to make it better.”
The importance of rest
For those engaged in traditional forms of work, the weekend exists. Even this two-day respite was only won by (unpaid) organizing by labor activists. For people who are currently a part of the response to the Trump administration’s attacks on the AIDS infrastructure or trans rights, many must find places to rest or recharge within already-packed schedules.
Just as Silverstein’s poem gave Johnson a model for how to take on the overwhelming amount of news, Johnson says that he has the same approach to rest. “What works for me is pacing myself throughout the day and having firm boundaries between when I’m ‘on’ and when I’m ‘off,’” he said. “I try to make my evenings and most of my weekend about fully letting go of the battle. That means avoiding emails, news, and any other kind of activation during my off hours and tapping into meditation and time spent with good friends to help my mind let go.”
Being able to navigate the current political landscape will require rest. As Tricia Hersey, the powerhouse behind the Nap Ministry, so succinctly puts it: Rest is resistance.
“Grind culture has normalized pushing our bodies to the brink of destruction,” Hersey wrote in the book “Rest Is Resistance”. “We proudly proclaim showing up to work or an event despite an injury, sickness, or mental break. We are praised and rewarded for ignoring our body’s need for rest, care, and repair.”
For Boyer, maintaining the distinction between time for working and time for resting is crucial for the next four years. “We need to realize when is the time to clock in, and when is the time to fight,” he said.
