Dear friend,
It’s so hot today. I’m sitting at my dining room table under the ceiling fan. I just got home from eating sushi and buying some groceries. My laundry is spinning in the washing machine.
I spent the morning picking up shoes from a Carouseller. Eating chicken rice. Having cold delicious teh C while the wind raged in through the windows of my home. Although it’s my day off from work, I did do work — I answered urgent messages, scheduled meetings, wrote a bit of copy. I booked my first ever astrology reading with an astrologer who feels just right for me. I thought about my finances. I let the mess of things on my bedroom floor rest, too, without disturbance from me. Later, I think I will bake bread. Or perhaps I will change my mind.
I’m pursuing my pleasure today. It’s not some hidden knot of feeling and sensation anymore, not mysterious or elusive. Sometimes we can miss each other. But I can recognise now how it feels. The way my breathing becomes present. My body softening into the environment. The warmth that arises, that must go out in a smile or greeting to whoever I’m near. When I catch up with my want — at least the simple ones — life becomes utterly, wonderfully liveable.
*
I remember a conversation with my Ecuadorian flatmate in third year of university. She was standing in the kitchen doorway, talking about feeling lazy and finding it hard to get herself to do work. As I moved my stir-fry around in the pan, I told her I was so tired, but I didn’t know how to rest. My flatmate frowned.
“What do you mean you don’t know how to rest?”
“Well, I just don’t know how to. Even when I make time for it, I’m not really sure how to do it.”
“How to do it?”
“Like, I only know how to work. When I try to rest, it doesn’t feel restful.”
(She asked me more questions and I shared more about my experience, but she ultimately left the conversation still astounded and surprised that it was possible to not know how to rest.)
At the time, I was in a politically left-leaning university, and also influenced by the anti-capitalist circles I moved within. I was working myself extremely hard on all fronts, maintaining an overachiever’s track record and a consistent cycle of burnout and pitiful recovery. Whenever I scheduled rest for myself, I would try to lie down as long as I could. I would try to do very little, to let my mind wander, and take naps. When those attempts failed, I would do things I associated with rest and pleasure, like buying flowers, having desserts, and watching Netflix. I thought rest was about indulging myself so I tried my best to. But it gave me no pleasure. Rest felt like a funny task I had no idea how to do.
I blamed my inability to rest on the way I’d been programmed to fear failure, stagnation, and falling behind. I blamed that programming on capitalist and Confucian logic that had infiltrated my parents’ generation. And I decided work was almost always something violent I was doing to myself, that was being done to me.
It’s been some years since university, and I’ve continued learning how to rest. In that process, I struggled with my propensity to work. The fact is, I do derive pleasure from work, and there are many things I am willing and happy to work for. There are also some kinds of work that offer me deep nourishment as I do them. While work has at times pulverised my spirit, it has also been a way of deep purpose for me, where I’ve been able to gather good people together to learn and make together. I’ve also been able to build wonderful things in my personal practice as a writer and artist.
I think what I’m mixing together here are different definitions of labour and work, across capitalism, Marxism, and layman-isms. Perhaps it is more relieving to say that there’s a lot I would use my time and mental, physical, and emotional energies to do, sometimes for other people, sometimes simply because I have the impulse for it. I feel good when I do these things. Sometimes I like being spent (to a limit) for what I care and am curious about. Exhaustion can also be a component of desire, and a companion of pleasure.
As my counsellor said, the good is often wound up with the bad. And our task is to decouple the different parts of the drive, to try and shed what is detrimental while holding on to what is useful. My drive to work can be good because it helps me do good things for myself and the world. My drive to work can be awful because it contains a kernel of fear that I will never be good enough, and the only way to get close to good enough is to work incessantly so I don’t fall behind.
What’s been vital for me in learning how to rest has not been being anti-work (although I support and believe in the r/antiwork movement!). It’s been about
decoupling work from my sense of self;
making real the option of resting by doing no work at all; and
realising that doing work that nourishes me can also be a valid form of rest.
In other words, giving myself a wider range of options around what rest looks like.
In other words, work (decoupled from capitalist drives) is not inherently terrible. Work that is tinged by desire for growth and expansion is also not immediately suspect. It’s when we think of work as an absolute priority that precedes the well-being of its workers that work becomes horrific. It’s when we do work as a matter of proving that we deserve to exist and have healthy, pleasurable lives that work becomes a bullying cage.
As I write this, I realise how blatantly obvious it sounds. It’s something easy to say and comprehend, but hard to fully internalise, embody, and do. When work, your employer, or financial stress frequently drives you to the breaking edge, it makes sense to think that our deepest rest and restoration is found in a total rejection of work. It makes sense that our conception of rest becomes a matter of sleeping as much as possible and doing nothing. There is incredible value in that idea of rest, especially if work tends to utterly deplete all your energies. In that situation, rest can become a matter of health and survival. It’s ideal to do nothing, sleep, and sloth it out.
What I’m pushing against is not that. What I’m pushing against is the thought that my pleasure is necessarily located outside of work. What I’m pushing against is the suggestion that my pleasure is related to work at all.
What I’m touching today is that my pleasure is not about doing no work. It’s not about rest and sleep and indulgence. It’s not even about getting what I want. My pleasure is about moving at the speed of my desire.
Moving at the speed of my desire allows me to discover my desire as it reveals itself to me, undressing in layers, sometimes flinching, sometimes flickering and spending time rolling on the ground in the dark. My desire changes its mind as new information becomes available, it takes time to parse through all its options and get distracted by the sudden rain outside the window. Lining up everything it wants before me would give me no pleasure. It is the foraging, the listening, the seeking, the rolling in the dark, the song that arises from all those slow frictions that makes me writhe and smile. It is about movement, and movement is not only about space, but also time. You may want to close that distance, but when?
As one of my favourite astrologers Austin Coppock said, “Speed is bullshit. Timing is everything.” Pleasure is not derived from speed — having everything we want at once. Pleasure is derived from timing — getting what we want in time with our desire. What we want arrives best when we are ready to receive it. Sometimes it’s when we have finally have clarity after a season of fog. Sometimes it’s when we lose an engagement and end up with free time that something new can fill. Sometimes it’s when we’ve been teased to the edge of our desire and are begging to fall off of it.
Sometimes, what we didn’t know we wanted also comes to us, catching us off guard. We turn to our desire with new eyes and spot a limb that’s been there all along, but which we did not see. Maybe we were too afraid to want it. Maybe we were too afraid to think we were the sort of people to want such a thing. Our sense of self has to catch up to the newfound reality of our desires.
*
And now, I’m going to go bake bread or something.
Tomorrow I’ll have other desires.
Love,
Kia Yee