Rest as Resistance
Lessons from Tricia Hersey, interrupted sleep, and the small spaces we still have to claim
I’ve been working on the My Very Own Bed evaluation for a few months now, listening to families talk about what it means to finally sleep through the night after years of instability. The irony is obvious: I haven’t been sleeping well myself. My mind doesn’t shut down. I fall asleep fast, then snap awake. I take melatonin at three in the morning or wake up too early and can’t drift back. My own rest feels thin and unreliable.
That contrast has been sitting with me.
Last weekend was supposed to be the repair. A few days on the Superior north shore. No work. Just time with my partner, outdoor hot tub, books, a trail. And then a live proposal landed, and the plan collapsed.
This is the reality of our field. We talk about well-being, dignity, and human-centered practice while working inside systems that reward urgency and punish spaciousness. You can schedule rest, even commit to it, and still lose it in a single email notification. Better planning doesn’t solve it. Some things in the social sector simply arrive when they arrive, and you either adapt or lose opportunities you can’t afford to lose.
Working with MVOB has made all of this sharper. Those families aren’t talking about “sleep outcomes.” They’re talking about relief. Stability. The ability to think clearly again because their bodies aren’t in constant vigilance. Listening to them forces me to confront how casually I treat my own rest, as if exhaustion were a normal condition of being a professional in this field.
That’s where Tricia Hersey’s work keeps echoing. “Rest is Resistance” isn’t a self-care slogan. It’s a structural critique. It names rest as something denied, disciplined, and treated as unearned. And it makes it impossible to pretend that my own insomnia is just inconvenience. It’s data about how I’m living and what I’m allowing work to do to my body.
Evaluation is supposed to help people see what’s actually happening, not what they hoped was happening. So I’ve been thinking about my own rest in those terms. Not as an outcome to optimize or a luxury to postpone, but as a condition that signals whether the system I’m operating within is even viable.
Some weekends fall apart. Proposals arrive at the wrong time. Sleep becomes strange and unpredictable. That will probably keep happening.
But even when rest is interrupted, the small spaces are still mine to claim. The minutes between obligations. The meditation practice, even if it’s just a few minutes of quiet before you open the laptop. The choice to pause for ten breaths instead of firing off one more message.
They don’t fix the system. But they add up in ways that matter.
We have to take them. We have to microadjust. And eventually the question becomes brutally simple: what is actually more important right now? One more email, or winding down enough to sleep well.
Anthralytic is built on a simple premise: social impact work should be human before it is technical. Our tools and evaluation methods are designed to create clearer thinking, better decisions, and more humane systems without adding to the exhaustion that already defines too much of this sector. We push for rigor, but not at the cost of people.