Marcia
In 2022 it became too obvious to me that I was not going to be able to continue doing all of the work that I was doing in all the places that I was doing it. I was experiencing worsening mental health and symptoms of burnout- like over 50% of physicians who participated in the 2021 National Physician Health Survey. As noted in the Health Workforce Assessment by the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences in addition to burnout and moral distress, I was experiencing workplace violence and discrimination and that created an intention for me to partially leave the health workforce. Other research papers and reports document how often Black, Indigenous, and racially marginalized individuals experience racism in the workplace or academy, and how that increases the risk for burnout and other negative impacts to mental health. I knew that I needed to decrease the arenas in which I both experienced racial violence and was also expected to lead systemic change. I left my public health job, increased my time at the university and took July off to rest. In rest came more clarity and creativity in how I approach my work in Indigenous health, social justice, and anti-racism.
I had a head start, maybe, from having worked with a coach since 2007, being a Certified Executive Coach, and coaching others over the past year on rest and joy while doing social justice work. What has become increasingly clear to me is:
- Black, Indigenous, and racially marginalized folks need to center rest and joy in their lives in order to be most effective at anti-racism and social justice work. This includes by honouring our own humanity, and thus creating the example and expectation for others to do the same.
- Our burnout will not be the thing that ends or fixes racism.
- We cannot get out of the health workforce crisis or address racism in health care without healthy, rested, well-supported Black, Indigenous, and racially marginalized folks leading the multiple forms of anti-racism work that needs to happen.
- White people also have roles to play in anti-racism that require personal decolonization work- rest will also be a foundation for this challenging work.
Delia
“I had to examine, in my dreams as well as in my immune-function tests, the devastating effects of overextension. Overextending myself is not stretching myself. I had to accept how difficult it is to monitor the difference. Necessary for me as cutting down on sugar. Crucial. Physically. Psychically. Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
(Audre Lorde, 1988, p. 125)
Audre Lorde wrote this essay in 1988 while she was fighting cancer. She died from the disease in November 1992. She was 58 years old.
In addition to Audre Lorde, writer/activist/scholars Barbara Christian, June Jordan, Bebe Moore Campbell, Toni Cade Bambara, Gloria Anzaldua, Claudia Tate, Beverly Robinson, Ruth Frankenberg, and Patricia Monture (to name but a few) all died from cancer. Erica Garner. bell hooks.
We persist.
Freedom struggles continue, as self-determination and emancipation remain unfinished projects.
There is no place to stand outside of racism, of white supremacy, of heteropatriarchy, of ableism.
There is a tendency to underestimate both the impact of everyday injustices and systemic discrimination and the impact of the fight against oppression.
The effects are cumulative and multidimensional. They are embodied, emotional, and psychological. They are matters of life and death.
We know racism is a public health issue and a key determinant of wellness, well-being, and health.
Fighting racism is also a public health issue and a key determinant of wellness, well-being, and health.
There is a cost for those who decide to name both the particularities of one’s oppression. There is a cost to fighting racial oppression – to fighting all manifestations of oppression.
The cost is not shared equitably.
In the university Black, Indigenous, and racialized staff and faculty have consistently had to bear the added weight of expectations, responsibilities, and burdens associated with addressing issues related to diversity and racial inequality, however, these forms of identity taxation or racialized equity labour work have become more onerous and more urgent owing to the perilous conditions borne of the pandemics of COVID 19 and racism.
We bear the brunt of racism, and we disproportionately bear the weight of addressing it.
Racism dehumanizes, rendering Black, Indigenous and racialized minority peoples as disposable.
Rest is recognition of our humanness. Rest is affirmation of our right to be…
I am mindful of Audre Lorde’s distinction between overextending versus stretching. I interpret overextending as going too far, beyond one’s capacity, to one’s detriment, while stretching involves growth and expansion, a broadening of perspectives, an unfolding of possibilities. I interpret stretching as the opposite of contracting or diminishing. Stretching is integral to the processes of learning and unlearning.
Rest, self-care, and self-preservation offer different paths forward – one that involves reflection, restoration, rejuvenation, reconnection to the many parts of ourselves that we suppress, ignore, silence.
Self-care is self-preservation.
Self-care is resistance.
And so much more…
As Tricia Hersey explains in her book Rest is Resistance: “Rest is care. Rest is radical” (p. 12).
Here’s to a year of rest, radical care, hope, and resistance.
Resources
Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (2023). Canada’s health workforce: An overview. Available at: https://cahs-acss.ca/assessment-on-health-human-resources-hhr/.
Canadian Medical Association (2022). National Physician Health Survey. Available at: https://www.cma.ca/sites/default/files/2022-08/NPHS_final_report_EN.pdf
Fuller, Kandace. (n.d.) The heart of Erica Garner: The cost of fighting back against racial inequality. Matters of the Heart, Issue 2. Available at
https://www.womanlymag.com/matters-of-the-hearts/articles/the-heart-of-erica-garner
Hersey, Tricia. (2022). Rest is resistance. New York, NY: Little Brown Spark.
Lorde, Audre. (1988). A burst of light and other essays. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand books.