Rediscovering Rest in an Oppressive World

Summary: I write about the new emotional challenges I am facing as an upcoming social worker in this current political environment and the neurodivergent-flavored exhaustion that resulted. I then describe the steps I took in order to turn the ship around, which included taking a thoughtful step back from previous spiritual routines. I hope that by sharing my own story, I encourage readers of this blog to consider what in their life they can change to gain more rest and presence.

It's been a tremendously busy season for me. Last month, I started my second year out of the two and a half of graduate school to gain a Masters in Social Work. I also began my field internship at a local LGBTQIA2S+ organization. You may already know that the current federal government administration has cut a substantial amount of funding for most social services, although they have specifically and ruthlessly targeted transgender-affirming organizations. Some other orgs serving the community in my local area are grandfathered into existing city and county budgets. My organization is not one of those, so I am less of an intern and more of an additional employee to a skeleton crew staff (fortunately paid).

The growth challenge I am most struggling with is the heavy emotional load of this internship, which fellow MSW students in my program have shared that they are also experiencing. It's one thing to read a news article about how bad things are right now, often with homelessness and other poverty concerns when it comes to where I live. It's another thing to be the person to spend well over an hour calling every place they can trying to get emergency overnight shelter for a client and to get zero response. The inability to do more for the people I intake is something I am still learning to accept and cope with.

Additionally, life transitions, including starting new roles, have historically been difficult on my neurodivergent body. I had to work from home the second week because the immense change triggered a hormonal cycle and left me too fatigued to work on site. In the recent past, a morning routine of meditation and yoga had seemed like the bare minimum of a consistent spiritual practice, but now I found I preferred to give them up for timeliness purposes. When I did spend my full time at the office, I'd come home and do little other than doomscroll. This is at odds with my values as I have found smartphone dependence on both a societal level and my own individual level to be increasingly repugnant in the last couple of months. I also noticed that my own doomscrolling had the desperate quality of ADHD dopamine-seeking. I realized my brain was doing this to try to find fuel because I was exhausted.

I determined that I had to change something, soon.

One of the messages I had been receiving consistently over the last month+ from both my supervisors and my spirits was "do less." I was actually set up to start doing this back when I was in Bali. One of my last nights I was there, I was closing very quickly in on sleep when Belial appeared with a request (of which I am still working on, that readers of this blog will hopefully ultimately see the result of). At the time, I found the interaction a little startling only because I was so close to sleep and really wanted to get there as my demon friend was pitching me on a writing commission. But what it ultimately highlighted to me is that hypnagogia—the phase you enter before you fall fully to sleep—might be a cool place to play around.

This led me to reading Jennifer Dumpert's book Liminal Dreaming: Exploring Consciousness at the Edge of Sleep. To self-protectively hedge, I am not quite sure I want to recommend this book. Dumpert mentions within it that she's friends with Gary Lachman, a writer on Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society who has been publicly transphobic, and she herself uses outdated terminology like "pregnant women." But credit to Dumpert, she defines liminal dreaming as the dreamspace we experience while in hypnagogia and hypnapompia, the latter being the phase we enter as we are just waking up. She encourages an approach differentiated from those who promote lucid dreaming, suggesting that lucid dreaming is about trying to control while liminal dreaming is about being receptive.

I won't say that since trying Dumpert's exercises I have had experiences as stark as what I had with Belial back in Bali. Actually, for the most part, those exercises have tricked my ADHD brain into thinking its doing work, which means I find myself in hypnagogia sooner, and without Belial to pull me back from the edge I often end up fully falling to sleep before anything notable arrives. I can't find it in me to complain about that, though. Either way, it's benefitting me.

I am also trying other restful practices prior to going to bed. Keeping good cognitive hygiene is one of them. A post on Tumblr reminded me that taking time throughout the day to space out, which is the time now often taken up by phone scrolling, is essential to "de-frag" your mind and help you process better. At first I set a "de-frag your mind" timer at 9 PM every night; soon after I started shutting my phone off entirely. There is plenty of research to show that the blue light off screens disrupts sleep ability and quality so this is likely helping my sleep. It also leaves me time to do anything but be on the internet, such as read books, write fiction, daydream, meditate, play with Sofia with full attention, and yell nonsense at Lucifer while he laughs at me.

Learning to better recognize when it is cognitively hard to do tasks on my own when I can instead do them with others is also key. I have had friends over to help me clean my woefully neglected apartment. I am now trying to organize a voting party with my trans masc support group to make voting for the midterms easier and more fun. I am also figuring out if I have friends with whom I can share my car and meals. I'm aiming to join more groups this year, both religious and play-based, to help balance out the stress I feel from work.

Entering a new era usually means reaching a sort of breaking point where it is revealed that something that worked before isn't going to work in this new circumstance. It doesn't work for me anymore to not get good rest. It doesn't work for me anymore to have unlimited smartphone use. It doesn't work anymore to not build in time in the day or evening where I can do my own activities. And it definitely doesn't work anymore that I have to do both work and all domestic labor on my own. I'm still establishing these new routines and efforts, but I know by recognizing and implementing all of this now I am building a more sustainable lifestyle for myself. Because this will change again; I am only in school and in this internship until the end of next year.

Wherever you are, friends, I hope you are either getting good rest for yourself or at least recognizing where you can get more. As midterms rapidly approaches, let's hope the so-called United States has reached its own breaking point en-masse.