Continuing to hold space for hope and heartbreak: How rest, joy and community can keep us a float

Welcome. I'm so glad you're here and I'm so glad to be back talking about the most important things on my heart. 

In our last episode we started by exploring how to stay awake in a world that desperately wants us to tune out. A world controlled by a global elite that thrive on our exhaustion and overwhelm when we're too tired and too worn down to collectively push back. And yet here we are continuing to hold that tension between hope and horror as we're still watching fascism unfold in real time, escalating every day in its brashness and its cruelty, and very much testing our capacity to stay awake 

I believe wholeheartedly that big paradigm shifts don’t happen overnight or with only one, single moment in time. They happen when we choose small acts of resistance, carried by many, many people of all walks of life and privilege. And so this episode is about helping you move through this time in the world with care and intention. We’ll explore what it means to really embrace rest without guilt, to lean into community and to seek joy as some of our most effective ways to resist and continue to hold space for both hope and heartbreak. 

Referenced in this episode:

Tricia Hersey - Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto 

Licensed intro music from NoMo

Transcript

Last year, I started what I had hoped would be a series of episodes on holding space for hope and heartbreak. A series of conversations on ways to reimagine how to move through our lives and the world in the wake of the new realities so many of us are waking up to. And then I disappeared. I went into a state of rest, of healing and recovery, of allowing myself the space, time, and permission to simply just stop. I traveled, I enrolled in school, I adopted a new dog. His name is Walter. He's a five-year-old Shih Tzu mix who was born blind and who came here all the way from the streets of California, and he's a joyful, hilarious, and wonderful boy who is currently snoring away in his fluffy, warm dog bed next to me. And in addition to all of this, I rested. I spent meaningful time with my loved ones and my community and I attempted to tune out all of the things I simply could not control. And today, I unabashedly come back to you, pulling myself out from a state of surrender because of that rest and that time that I took to reset. 

I can't even believe how much time has actually really passed. It has felt like the literal blink of an eye, and I'm back here with the knowledge of yet another long list of ongoing atrocities to process. Coming back to this space to recover amongst community, amongst values-aligned humans. And the conversation is sadly not one that really requires any actual pivot from where we started in part one. We started by exploring how to stay awake in a world that desperately wants us to tune out. A world controlled by a global elite that thrive on our exhaustion and overwhelm when we're too tired and too worn down to collectively push back. And yet here we are continuing to hold that tension between hope and horror as we're still watching fascism unfold in real time, escalating every day in its brashness and its cruelty, and very much testing our capacity to stay awake 

And there are so many things happening in so many different parts of the world and in my own backyard here in Canada, in Alberta, in the quote unquote Texas of Canada, where far-right, very hate-filled ideology is still growing legs every single day. And anyone who is aware and in tune, we really feel it. I personally can't ever fully look away because in addition to having a heart for humanity, I know in my core that what is happening in the US, in Iran, in Cuba, in Congo, in Sudan, in Palestine, all of this sets the blueprint of what could very, very easily happen here. And as much as I desired for 2026 to be this year where I was maybe a little less informed and more rooted in the art of escapism, I still believe that in the spaces where we have the capacity and the privilege to only bear witness with space to pause and to reflect that we have the responsibility to consider how we move past our proclivity for comfort and the urge to look away and actually begin reimagining what resistance, born not out of some grand revolution, but as a daily practice of choosing humanity again and again can actually look like.

Let me remind you of something that I need to hear and often hear is that if history has taught us anything at all, it is that all empires eventually fail, and that evil always overplays its hand, and that the possibilities of a new way of living really do require a sort of collective reframe, one that is actually meaningfully rooted in humanity, in collectivism, and one that attempts to do better and be better. Because one thing I believe wholeheartedly is that big paradigm shifts don't really happen overnight or with only one singular moment in time. They happen when all of us collectively choose small acts of resistance, those acts carried by many, many people of all walks of life and privilege. And my intention with this series that we're picking back up is to help you tap into that awareness for yourself, to help you create a sort of personal toolkit to reference and to reflect on in moments when you're absolutely unsure of what to do next. And some of which we'll cover in this episode are really, really self-focused, and others in what we will explore in the last part of this series are more collectivist-focused. But both are equally important to moving through this time in our lives with care and intention. And in this episode, we'll explore what it means to really embrace rest without guilt, to lean into community, and to seek joy as one of our most effective ways to resist.

As I hear myself saying those words out loud, I very much admit that it all sounds a little bit trite. I very much struggled for a long time to get this episode written in a way that felt meaningful and that actually balanced speaking to the realities of the immense privilege that I hold while advocating for changes in a way that really meets the moment. Not with lofty, inaccessible ideas that although are very rooted in good intention and of course moral integrity, often miss the mark in meeting people where they are at, missing the context of people's lives and their capacity to hold space for lived experiences that feel incredibly different from their own struggles when they have known nothing else but privilege. That privilege shows up in knowing that I have space and capacity to bear witness to all of the atrocities in the world from my phone in the comfort of my home, shielded from living through the direct consequences in my day-to-day life right now as a middle class Canadian. My lived reality currently is probably not all that different from many of you. Many of us have never had to flee war zones, have never lived through fascism or the genocide of our people. We've learned about past atrocities in the world through history books and the current realities through our time spent on social media. And you, like me, have probably felt at a loss about what to do. We're asked to exist in workplaces where conversations on the ways in which the world is literally falling apart, those are considered too taboo and disruptive, all while we're being asked to support the world's demise by becoming proficient in working with AI. It's all very dystopian and it's really no wonder the opportunity to reimagine something different feels so completely out of reach. So many of us feel powerless. Regardless though, I believe that staying awake and attuned to what is going on around us is key and that the larger solutions aren't necessarily radical at first, at least not that which gets to the heart of collective action. I believe that to be part of the solution to impact any sort of change, practices like rest, investing in community, and seeking joy are foundational to what needs to come next. 

The problems that we're grappling with are complicated and layered, and the solutions are incredibly nuanced, especially for those of us that have the privilege to simply reflect on and consider how we can contribute. Self-care that is in service of a bigger picture is genuinely not a trivial tactic that was conjured up by some modern-day wellness influencer, but rather it's very much rooted in activism, in the lessons from the front lines of the civil rights movement, apartheid, and the like. And part of the blueprint to meaningful change for us to stay positioned and ready and rooted in hope and afloat in the chaos is some of these things A

nd that word chaos is very interesting to me. I have a very familiar relationship with it. I know the chaos of what happens when rest is not prioritized when it's not seen as a key tool to responding to the brutality of the world. Chaos has been a very great teacher for me both the kind that life throws at me and the kind that I invite in myself and it has genuinely been the biggest catalyst for my capacity to today reframe what rest should really look like. And I'm not talking about rest in some theoretical sense or the kind that, you know, we prioritize when we're absolutely desperate to get out of a catatonic state, the kind that we have to fight to access amongst some sense of deep burnout. I'm talking specifically about guilt-free rest that is prioritized in order to avoid the perils of burnout and exhaustion that we simply can't crawl our way out of. I know guilt-free rest and even just rest in general is such an immense privilege often not afforded to people who are very much in survival mode. 

I know that story all too well. I think about my immigrant parents who had to wait until retirement to rest only to be met by a host of health concerns. Rest wasn't available to them, and that awareness makes me acutely familiar with the idea that I have an abundance of options about how I get to choose so differently than they did. They gave up their whole life for granting their future children access to a life that they never had. They valued and prioritized education, planting those seeds early on so that I knew what pathway to open up to help level out the playing field for someone like me, someone from a poor immigrant racialized family. They gave me a home rent-free well into my late 20s, and yet despite all of this, despite what I witnessed and watched for my entire childhood I have and still do struggle with burnout. I've struggled to the point of often abandoning the things that very much light me up in service of saying yes to everything just to uphold this very truly unnecessary form of self-induced survival mode, and maybe you can relate.

I will probably always be working on this in therapy because true to form for me, I learn lessons the hard way. I'm neurodivergent, living with ADHD, and my brain genuinely struggles with taking the path of least resistance. Let me paint a picture for you on what I really mean. Last year, three months after losing my soul dog Ollie to cancer, when I was in a moment of grief, I decided to apply to become a dog foster from the same animal rescue agency where I had adopted Ollie from nine years prior. It felt like this beautiful full circle moment for me as they had put out an urgent call for dog fosters. And true to my very impulsive ADHD nature, I signed up thinking it would be exactly the thing I needed to help me heal, going against all better judgment and every single reminder from my therapist to actually rest without overcomplicating life to really ensure that I had what I needed to navigate things with more clarity and more strength, and frankly, to give myself the space and the respect that my grief deserved. And the universe delivered, not only with a six-year-old dog, but one that was severely malnourished, anxiously attached, not potty trained, and one who had what we will say were some unique medical needs outside of that. He was described to me as a spicy Chihuahua. And did I mention that the little guy was also a barking connoisseur who accessed his voice any time I was not in his direct line of sight? The little darling, named Pretzel, who turns out actually wasn't so spicy after all, was from the streets of Los Cabos, Mexico, and he really lived his best life with me. For five weeks, he lived in a high-rise condo in downtown Calgary. He plumped up in weight. He gained confidence and started to heal, all while I lost endless amounts of sleep. I became an expert in cleaning mass amounts of poop off my floors, and I very much spiraled in my mental health from having taken on this really big responsibility so soon in my grief journey. Pure chaos. 

And that relationship with my grief journey has never, ever been linear. To this day, over a year later, I often find myself at night looking through photos and videos of my Ollie boy, really crying from the depths of my being, from the literal physical pain of just missing him so much and knowing how desperately I needed to prioritize processing and healing, very much in the same way that I tried to do when I lost my dad four years before. And I carried so much shame for having to ask for help to rehome this little Chihuahua, not wanting to disrupt his journey to his forever home, yet knowing deep in me that he really deserved to be in a home where those who were caring for him could do so without the extra weight of their own grief stories. And when I finally did it, finally asked for help to rehome him, the space was truly reopened for me to stop and reprioritize my mental health, my grief journey, and to refocus on what I really needed to stay afloat I share all of this because I hope it demonstrates how complicated and messy the journey to granting ourselves permission to actually rest can look. It's so complicated for so many people, especially folks that are caregivers, especially mothers and fathers who navigate so much of the extra weight of the world on your shoulders. But I also share this to emphasize how important a foundation of rest really is to all other forms of growth, progress, and yeah, even resistance. 

Many of us, especially those carrying marginalized identities, those of us who identify as women, we're programmed to say yes without hesitation, taking on more and more, sometimes to prove a sense of worthiness or tapping into our innate nurturing, caring nature, but never really giving ourselves permission to challenge our need to be of service. And my therapist has often had to remind me and ground our conversations in telling me about all of the ways in which the world is really not designed for women, for racialized people, for anyone of marginalized identity, and that in order to manage with any ounce of sanity, doing the opposite of what we're encouraged to do, actually opting out of hustle culture, saying no to the things that don't serve you or the collective wellbeing of your larger community, pushing back on the need to be compliant and polite while the world is literally run by pedophiles and genocide enablers. Those are actually the key to living a more fulfilled life, but also importantly, the key to navigating a world that has never been designed to see us thrive. And we cannot do any of that without stopping first. 

One of the most important teachers in my journey to really understanding the connection between rest and resistance is a woman named Tricia Hershey, and starting with her work in the book Rest Is Resistance Manifesto. The book is paradigm-shifting and mind-bending, and was one of the first introductions I had to rethinking all of the things that we've been taught about hustle culture, the grind, and all of the ways oppressive powers require us to be too exhausted to fight back. I wanna read you some of her compelling words to help connect the dots on how deeply interconnected rest and resistance really are. 

Tricia says that "in order for a capitalistic system to thrive, our false beliefs in productivity and labor must remain. We have internalized its teachings and become zombie-like in spirit and exhausted in body. So we push ourselves and each other under the guise of being hyper-productive and efficient. From a very young age, we begin the slow process of disconnecting from our body's need to rest and are praised when we work ourselves to exhaustion. We tell our children to stop being lazy when they aren't participating in work culture with the same intensity as us. We lose empathy for ourselves first and push excessively. We become managers, teachers, and leaders who fall prey to the allure of a capitalistic system and treat those we have the honor of working with as human machines. We become rigid and impatient when our checklist isn't completed to perfection. We become less human and less secure. We believe we are only meant to survive and not thrive. We see care as unnecessary and unimportant. We believe we don't really have to rest. We falsely believe hard work guarantees success in a capitalistic system."

And Tricia goes on to say, "You were not born to center your entire existence on work and labor. You were born to heal, to grow, to be of service to yourself and community, to practice, to experiment, to create, to have space to dream and to connect." And that "rest is an act of rebellion, with Tricia noting that loving ourselves and each other deepens our disruption of the dominant systems. They want us unwell, fearful, exhausted, and without deep self-love, because you're easier to manipulate when you are distracted by what is not real or true."

Oof. Every time I hear her wisdom and her gospel, I just stop in my tracks. And I've had to ask myself so many times, and I invite you to do the same, what stops you from resting? What stops you from prioritizing your authentic needs, not the ones that others tell you to prioritize to make a, quote-unquote, "good life," but the ones you and your body really need? What stops you from saying no more often to the things that are directly connected to only a sense of obligation so that you actually have the time, space, and capacity to move through the world with clarity and conviction? What small changes can you make starting today that will help you prioritize guilt-free rest? What will you say no to so you can stay awake to what really matters? Where is the line you will draw for yourself to stop creating what Tricia Hersey calls legacies of exhaustion? 

You don't need your own Pretzel story. You need to rest. 

It's also become clearer and clearer that we aren't meant to do all of this on our own. Life and witnessing all of the terrors of our current day reality cannot be consumed in isolation without chipping away meaningful parts of our soul. As a society, we are offered so many ways to avoid human interaction, to even level up in our day-to-day existence. Self-checkout lines, grocery delivery to your front door, Apple Watches that track every single step that you take and every single moment of standing and one-sided parasocial relationships with influencers built entirely online. But the truth is that we aren't meant to bear witness to all of this destruction and chaos around us without the capacity to lean on one another, to ask for help, to create space for the inconvenience.

What is that saying? Everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be a villager. And that inconvenience is the price you pay for community. And community can look and feel really different for everyone. As someone whose ADHD symptoms seem ever more exasperated in the last number of years, my daily dose of medication is really that saving grace that allows me to show up more consistently for myself and others, albeit not perfectly. It has given me the sense of control back that which otherwise would feel really insurmountable. And genuinely, it's not really about productivity for me, but that it provides me with a boost of dopamine needed to really stay present and to focus on seeing things for exactly what they are, moving into action for that which I can influence and control, and leaving everything else behind. And as hard as I resisted this pathway to supporting my ADHD diagnosis, thinking that, you know, I could manage life and the expectations and living in a world that requires people to exist primarily in very neurotypical ways, it has really been one of the most important forms of self-care that I could have ever enacted into my life. It wouldn't have been possible had it not been for my village, for my community. Through conversations with trusted peers who have now become really dear friends, I was first encouraged to explore a diagnosis for myself. And then because of those people's perspectives and their firsthand experiences, I decided to try on what it would look like to do something other than white-knuckle my way through life by getting on a stimulant medication. 

Not only was ADHD a really shameful young boy's problem, as it was labeled back when I was growing up, but I was also growing up in an immigrant low-income household with parents who were very much in survival mode, disconnected from their larger family structures, and where often, frankly, a lot of normal Western development experiences were met with a lot of discomfort and shame. They did the best that they could do, but they likely wouldn't have had the capacity to know what to do with the child who had ADHD or even notice that there was something disconnected. So those perspectives, the vulnerability of friends and trusted loved ones who know who they are, were that life raft of community that I didn't even realize that I genuinely needed. 

When therapy speak and boundaries and all of this ideas of self-care, those are all packaged to be this be all, end all solution without consideration of community and reciprocity and collectivism. We often can end up being unable to see past our own privilege and then passively sit back watching events that are so deeply connected to our shared human experience and thinking that we simply can't do anything to stop it. But rather community, in whatever way you wanna define it, is that needed silver lining for today's times that help you step out of ourselves to really deepen the understanding of the interconnectedness of everything, and that just takes effort and intentionality. For me, one of the contributions I think I get to make to my larger sense of community is with this podcast, something I do because I have this really deep down core desire to just share my perspectives, knowing that it has impacted and shaped the way that some folks see the world and their privilege or themselves, or that it makes someone feel way less alone. I've had multiple conversations with community members and people that I've built friendships and relationships with through this platform on the impact. I make no money off this platform, but I have gained over the last seven years this really beautiful network and community of very like valued humans who share space with me to reflect on the world and seek to be part of some kind of change. Yet even when writing out this episode, as I mentioned, I got stuck for so many months, and a lot of it was on trying to make this perfect in order for it to feel valuable to the audience that may come across this one day. I got stuck on the ego element of my writing that now has to constantly compete with the voice of literal robots on a daily basis instead of just trusting that I was putting something out there that served the purpose of potentially shifting someone's perspective despite it not being perfect or to the standard that I like to think of my, my work at. And what you're hearing now in this episode is very much my attempt at pushing through that in answer to this question that I've grappled with, and it's that, what would it look like to show up in community in a way that feels meaningful rather than obligatory? And if you're in a similar space of uncertainty, perhaps you can glean some inspiration from my imperfect musings and take that step to be in community in imperfect reciprocity. 

And I'm also trying really hard, really hard to actively rewire my brain to become more intimately connected with joy I know that that probably sounds so unbelievably silly however maybe you can relate.

At 46 years old now, at 45 when I was writing this episode, so much of my life really was centered around pleasing and doing what was expected, you know, albeit in my own unique ways, but to glom some sense of internal worthiness. And all of this coupled with this very natural inclination for a lot of generalized anxiety meant that I very, very rarely carved out space to discover the things that I really, really enjoy, where I feel the most alive and get to explore experiences that simply bring me joy without any sense of complication. And for a long time, I thought that my brain-rotting obsession with all things Bravo and Real Housewives counted, but really they don't. And so now I'm trying to actively find ways to rewire my brain. And one of those catalysts for joy was the decision to take up swimming lessons at the age of 45. 

And maybe I need to build some context before this, you know, dredges up shock and horror for those of you who learned to swim at a very young age or those who, you know, actively find themselves diving into the literal deep end on a regular basis. My parents very much did the right thing when I was a kid. They enrolled me in Red Cross swimming lessons. I very vividly remember my colored badges every time you would pass a certain level, despite the fact that they were not active swimmers themselves. And I did the best that I could do before calling it in because I was no longer enjoying it. I learned the basics, but over the last 40-plus years, I have very much avoided being in bodies of water. I've lived the majority of my life in a landlocked province with very few natural bodies of water that are actually swimmable. And my favorite place in the world to visit and to vacation is New York City. And that type of urban, walkable city is very much my vibe, even on trips and holidays. But very much little did I actually know about how much I was missing out on the feelings of very pure joy, of serenity and peace that water could give me until I started doing aquafit with my best friend at the start of last year. That experience was also coupled with a trip to Greece that I had last summer. And it meant that I had the fuel and the motivation and the excuse to enroll in adult swimming lessons to really ensure that I could fully embrace my European summer without the fear of drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. 

And yes, there was extreme, not mild, but extreme embarrassment that came from being taught how to swim by a 17-year-old instructor at my big old age, and truly extreme vulnerability being out and about in a not so flattering but very functional bathing suit with my not so summer-ready body. But there were many comical reflections that since embarking on that experience, uh, really brought me this side of so much joy with a little bit of brain rewiring. 

To some such an experience wouldn't require an ounce of courage. But for me, it did in ways that showed me that I was capable of blocking out all of the internal noise and external judgment, because there was quite a bit of it. But to do something that made me feel a little bit sheepish and vulnerable, yet very much opened up time and space for everything to be tuned out for that one hour a week. And what I discovered through that process genuinely changed my brain chemistry. I know now that floating on my back, blocking out all of the noise for an hour a week, that is medicine for me. It's peace, it's joy, it's healing, all in ways that I wouldn't have discovered had I not given myself permission to look silly and try something new. And science really backs this up. Neuroplasticity is a real thing. Our brains can actually rewire at any age, especially through new, joyful experiences. So no, I'm not suddenly athletic, but I've found something really beautiful, something selfish in the best way, something that makes life feel a little less overwhelming. And if you haven't tried something new lately, just for the joy of it, maybe this is your nudge. Start with a simple dopamine menu, a list of things that light you up. Some quick hits like a playlist or completing your daily Wordle, or scheduling a regular FaceTime call with a friend, or other things that take up a little more effort but genuinely ground you deeply. And especially if you're neurodivergent, this kind of essential joy and intentional joy is so important. It keeps you in a space of staying awake and ready and afloat to stay in the fight.

So I wanna leave you with these sentiments and reminders. Rest. Protect your peace from the wrong people, but go in hard for the right people. Float if you can. Do something that rewires your brain for joy. And most importantly, be gentle with yourself. It's the only way that we have through this. Until next time.