The Radical Choice to Rest

In a world shaped by climate change and hustle culture, the decision to sleep is indeed revolutionary.

I wish I were a visual artist. For now, I’ll use Adobe’s ethical AI, Firefly.

Hey! Hi. Hello there. It’s been a minute.

I am alive, contrary to what those of you whose messages and emails and projects I’ve ignored for the better part of six months might think. 

But I have not felt well. The new diagnoses I’ve acquired range from the expected (tears in both ankles) to the gobsmacking (frontal lobe epilepsy), and since a kidney infection at the end of January, I’ve struggled to keep up with paid work let alone enjoy time with friends or foster my creative endeavors. I’m simply exhausted.

Although I shouldn’t feel ashamed of allotting 12 hours a night for rest and recovery, I do. Thanks to the invention of electricity (and Edison’s obsession with overcoming the biological need to sleep), we’ve been culturally conditioned to go, go, go, no matter the hour and no matter how we feel. I distinctly remember the moment my aunt—an OG IT professional and the first person in my mother’s family to get a master’s degree, a woman I admired endlessly as a child—scolded me for snoozing on the stairs on a Saturday afternoon.

“You can sleep when you’re dead,” she chided.

Unsurprisingly, the incessant pressure we all feel to both produce and consume correlates with the rise in global temperatures. Writes Satish Kumar in The Guardian, “The external problem of carbon emissions is connected with the internal problem of desire. If we stay in the rat-race 24 hours, seven days a week, we are bound to pollute our inner space as well as the outer space.”

But when we sleep, writes Liana Demasi in Atmos:

…so do most of the resources we depend upon, effectively preserving them. Our cars aren’t running, our computers are shut down, and most, if not all, of the lights are off. We’re also not eating, showering, or making coffee. This gives the planet time to recharge, too. In fact, if the over 300 million people living in just the United States alone got just one more hour of sleep a night, we could in theory save up to 2.4 billion pounds of CO2 emissions every day.

If an extra hour of sleep sounds crazy, hold on to your sweet bippy. Michael J. Coren in The Washington Post suggests that we all observe a climate sabbath. One day a week of rest could “slow the pace of consumption, curb emissions [and] ease the burden of so many people working weary weekends.”

As temperatures continue to rise, as many as 800 million people around the world—including residents of the entire continental U.S.—may have their sleep interrupted by high heat and humidity. In the age of climate change, rest becomes a radical act.

Our brains and bodies fully functioning, we’ll be better prepared to tackle the climate crisis, writes Demasi, with “a more active and present mind [that] can engage in longer-lasting, sustainable choices.”

So, this holiday weekend, instead of feeling guilty about sleeping in, hit snooze. Luxuriate in a hurkle durkle. Bed rot by doom-scrolling through climate catastrophes if you must. Then TAKE A NAP. It’s better for your health, and it’s better for the planet.

And in Other News…

I’m thrilled to join Cohort 1 of Step Zero, a nonprofit promoting sustainable living through impactful storytelling, and I’m about to complete my fellowship with Climatebase, an accelerator connecting veterans in climate with folks new to the space to enhance their knowledge, expand their network, and advance their careers with capstone projects. (I hope to combine my belonging to both of these efforts into a climate-action reality TV show!)

There are not enough fingers and toes on my body to count the number of amazing folks I’ve met through Climatebase, including the lovely and brilliant

Diana Haemer

, with whom I had the pleasure of speaking for her wonderful Substack,

In Circulation

.

[Q&A] Gia Mora

Equally fun in a totally different way, I got to talk about John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” with my pals Eamon O’Flynn and Nathan Smith on another episode of Record Roulette. If you like Coltrane, here’s a cool site explaining how Sheets of Sound actually works. How he did all that flying high as a kite I’ll never know, but then again, I’m not a genius (or a saint).

May marks EDS/HSD Awareness Month, which I didn’t even know had a dedicated month until this year. If you’ve come to my work through my HuffPost essay or through Jen Sparkman’s upcoming documentary, you may also want to check out The Bendy Bodies Podcast and Rebecca Niederlander’s incredible talk on the connection between giftedness and chronic illness.

#ZebraStrong representing at LA’s Disability Pride Festival last year. Photo courtesy of Jen Sparkman.

Lastly, hooray for the first Climate Reality Check, which examines whether a film or television narrative acknowledges that climate change exists and that a character is aware of it. Kind of a low bar, if you asked me, but so is the Check’s spiritual predecessor, the Bechdel-Wallace Test, which looks to find programs with at least two named female characters talking about something other than a male. But hey—I’m an optimist, and I’ll take every bit of traction I can get!

Plus, after a wonderful Vegan Women Summit, I’m excited to attend the Hollywood Climate Summit this June to see how we can use that cultural juggernaut to inspire climate action. In the meantime, *insert yawn here* I’ve gotta get some shuteye.

For the sake of all life on Earth, of course.

Tanti baci,