Letting Ourselves “Put It Down”
WoC shoulder the burden of keeping it all together when crises strikes; here’s what’s needed instead.
It’s a rainy Sunday morning. I’ve been watching the little Strawberry tree my partner and I planted this winter toss and sway. When we planted her, one could hardly call her a tree — more a sturdy shoot. We used straps to keep her upright. Today though, the straps are off. She’s strong enough to bend and right herself over and over.
I imagine we all could feel some sense of simpatico with this leafy presence bobbing and tipping. Now, in a storm beyond what we’ve collectively faced, daily life is both simpler and more challenging than ever before. We’re balancing working from home and childcare; the desire to stay connected and screen burnout; the urge to be of service and our own capacity. We’re confronting general feelings of overwhelm, fear, grief and anger.
Many of us are exhausted and while this makes sense, I’ve noticed for the WoC and women I work with, allowing this feeling and letting ourselves rest is not o.k. Though we’re understandably drained, there’s still a sense that we’re not doing enough. “We are not enough.” It’s as if those words, structured by our patriarchal, capitalist, white supremacist society, are whispering in our ears louder than ever.
Many of us have learned to prove ourselves by being more than we can humanly be. We keep it together. We show up. We get the job done. We push our feelings to the side to be there for others.
While, as author Jenny Odell writes in her book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, we’ve all been impacted by “a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency,” those who are marginalized and thus already socially deemed as “less than” feel even more pressure to prove their worth by this metric.
Naturally, amid a global tragedy, we feel an expectation to carry on at the same level as before or to be and do more than ever. In speaking with the fierce woman I work with, many have felt frustrated, worried or upset by their bodies’ inability to do it all. They agreed to let me share some of their sentiments:
Some days I just can’t get out of bed.
I’m either going to be a good mom right now or a good employee.
I keep making lists but not getting any further.
I thought I would have extra time to write but I can’t open a page.
All I can do is watch the news and stress clean.
In watching the storms today, I’m reminded that it is our ability to “not do” that reveals our strength. As the world swirls, we can bravely stand in the midst of all that turbulence and declare this act as simply enough. For marginalized bodies, this in itself is a political action. As Audre Lord reminds us, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
What is needed right now is not doing, but being. My little tree out front is not trying to reach beyond itself. The sun that coaxes its becoming is currently obscured. It’s hunkered down and bending in the current. This bending is what makes it resilient. Similarly, for us humans, it is when we stop striving, growing and achieving that we can fully allow ourselves to be with what is. Rather than fighting against it, we can let ourselves be moved and strengthened by the torrents.
This is not to say that we must stop doing. Right now, doing is bending like the tree. It is showing up for work; filing for unemployment; feeding ourselves and our families good food; calling friends and neighbors, taking walks, supporting local restaurants.
We do the best we can then we put it down to recover, to rest, to recognize all the energy that went into that effort. We settle ourselves because every moment of rest is important in a storm. We come to know that it is because we can bend, shift and let ourselves be weathered that we are strong.