Over the last month, my thoughts have been fragmented, my heart fatigued, as I’ve struggled to imagine being able to endure one more TikTok or CNN alert about the harm that Black women will have to endure in this country at the hands of a Trump administration. I, like many others, continuously experience what psychologists have distinguished as the acute impact of “microinvalidation,” or anything that invalidates or excludes the experience of a specific group.
These feelings of paralysis and exhaustion were similar to the ones that set my nonprofit storytelling incubator, Rosa Rebellion, into motion over five years ago. In 2017, we witnessed the premature death of Erica Gardner (the daughter of Eric Gardner); she died of a heart attack after pursuing justice for her father’s murder at the hands of police. After witnessing such a young Black woman succumb to the physiological and mental trauma of racial injustice while so many other Black activists continue to struggle with their mental health, we were inspired to launch our first initiative, Rebel + Rest – a carefully curated retreat centering the rest, restoration, and rejuvenation of BIPOC community organizers, activists, and caregivers.
In this current moment post-election – where frustration, fervent resentment, and fatigue run rampant – my message to Black women is: “Be still, stay sane.”
Now, this call for stillness is not to discourage ongoing resistance or action. Rather, it’s to acknowledge that our labor, our emotional depletion, and our multi-generational trauma caused by living in a country that over and over again has said it doesn’t value our humanity, nor love us, deserve respite.
This holiday season, let us collectively give ourselves the permission . . . to sit, be still, and center ourselves.
This holiday season, let us collectively give ourselves the permission not to just dust ourselves off, rise again, and report for duty. Instead, let’s sit, be still, and center ourselves. While Maya reminds us of the inevitability that “shall I rise,” perhaps in this moment we can reclaim our power from a posture of “shall we sit down.”
This election cycle was an affirmation that America’s cultural ethos prioritizes the maintenance of whiteness, power, and capitalism. In response to this undeniable reality, over the last few weeks, I’ve been asked to speak at numerous events and companies on how brands can create more equitable spaces and inclusive cultures. I’d never felt more unmotivated, or more convinced that this work is futile. Intellectually, I know that’s not entirely true, but at the moment, emotionally and spiritually it felt accurate.
And yet, anytime I thought to decline or reschedule these requests of my time, feelings of obligation, guilt, and the inability to separate my own needs from a sense of duty to community and cause interrupted me. I recalled words from therapists and racial trauma practitioners Davia Roberts and Danielle Locklear, who have often served as speakers at Rosa Rebellion’s annual Rebel + Rest retreat: “Too often, as women of color, particularly as empaths and community caregivers, we move from a place of guilt,” they said. “But that’s not sustainable. We have to move from a place of purpose.”
Women of color deserve to not just continue to operate from a place of strength and resilience, but to make history from a place of wholeness and peace. In a world that constantly beckons us to be strong, resilient, and present, I offer a paradigm shift. As we enter a known national terror of complicity with unknown consequences this January, I am taking up a renewed posture renegotiating how much of me these systems get of my energy, mind, and brilliance. We have an opportunity to carve out a new rhythm for ourselves, one that centers our dignity and our humanity. It shouldn’t be so hard fought. It should feel innate, intimate, and integral to our everyday posture.
We have an opportunity to carve out a new rhythm for ourselves, one that centers our dignity and our humanity.
It’s an active practice, one that I have not mastered. As a quintessential millennial, I’ve witnessed the act of self-care be commodified, the concept of wellness be whitewashed, and the practice of rest unduly reformed into something that must be earned. For much of my adulthood, I equated rest with vacation and spa days, and subconsciously yet actively approached my continuous work – my rejection of all rest – from a posture of martyrdom. To me, the work wasn’t valid unless I’d exhausted my mental, physical, and spiritual capacity. And the impact wasn’t meaningful unless I felt and empathized completely with the oppressed.
But, in practical terms, rest may look like logging off Instagram for a day (or three months), taking a walk, finding time for prayer or meditation, or unburdening ourselves from the mental load of serving as either the political labor mule or social-emotional mammy for a world that has failed to honor and protect our humanity.
Cole Arthur Riley, author of the forthcoming “Black Liturgies,” offers us this invitation: “Silence is a fierce resistance against the violence of a world whose words are not for us. In a world where we are expected to constantly articulate our dignity, we will rest.” There is more to our story as Black women than struggle and resistance. We are authors of beauty and architects of brilliance. Getting to that place requires that we invite practices of joy. Joy in some ways is an exercise of freedom, an active posture of liberation.
This past weekend, I hosted a holiday party. I gathered 17 people in my two-bedroom apartment for Texas chili, holiday karaoke, an intense game of taboo, and a reminder that our bodies were meant for joy and laughter and are living, breathing embodiments of our ancestral claim to collective wholeness.
It’s a stance that feels ever delicate, and yet ever so dire as the world reminds us through cultural practice and policy that our well-being is up for negotiation. Let us resist oppression, let us resist alienation, let us resist the silencing of our stories, let us resist the patriarchal structures, let us resist the centering of white co-agitation in our pursuit of liberation, and let us resist the capitalistic paradigms that keep us working past exhaustion. And in the process, perhaps most poignantly, let us reclaim our time, our shalom, our joy and liberation.
And if you need help reminding yourself this holiday season, here are some words from some of my favorite voices:
- “I embraced joy as my birthright. Radical joy is inherent as a human need and not some special trinket you get after you rise high enough on the social-economic ladder or unlock some special level of desirability or accomplishment.” – Tanya Denise Fields
- “I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black; it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.” – June Jordan
- “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence; it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” – Audre Lorde
Virginia A. Cumberbatch is a racial justice educator, writer, and creative activist and the CEO and cofounder of Rosa Rebellion, a production company for creative activism by and for women of color. She’s a graduate of Williams College and the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and is the author of “As We Saw It: The Story of Integration at the University of Texas at Austin.”
