Do You Need a Rest Before You Rest?

The Happy Half after a WTFundamentalist week of spankers and dictators

What’s just as true as anything else for me this week is that I’m having a change of scenery. In the great both/and of being a writer who deconstructs fundamentalism, who also had a serious essay in the Huff Post this week, who often feels hounded by headlines that I already ran from once, I’m having a rest.

It’s a pre-rest before a different kind of work. Pre-rest is one of my self-care practices to regulate my nervous system as a trauma survivor. It’s in the periphery of slow-travel, although traveling isn’t necessary for pre-rest. Pre-rest is a buffer zone—a margin.

Pre-rest is just what it sounds like. Rest before the rest. You’ll know it’s appealing to you if you ever feel like you have to “hurry up and get to vacation” or “hurry up and rest quick, before the chance evaporates.” I’m not good at that. I end up rushing through rest, not really resting, and as a result, feel irritated that rest interrupted my workflow. Vacations are stressful. It’s 10x harder to get back into the swing of things, and so I elect not to rest. To make constant work my habit. Which, you know, like it or not, isn’t sustainable.

The week ahead isn’t quite full-on “rest” because it’s a different kind of work. I’m the featured writer at

Writing in the Dark with Jeannine Ouellette

’s CAMP, which will be work-lite in the midst of a ton of creative play. It’s happening at Camp Wandawega, in Wisconsin, a “Bespoke Inn” and it looks like The Parent Trap with Haley Mills with a Wes Anderson filter. They have a “manifesto of low expectations” and a vibe that transports me back to early childhood. I’m beside myself with glee that I get to go, let alone go as an author. But for me, it will be energizing: a work-rest replaced with creative play, and a reflection of an important realization I often get too busy to hold:

My fucking dreams are coming true. Have come true. Will continue to come true. I’m “beside myself” because going North takes me out of my ordinary life, away from the headlines before they even happened. Before I was meddled with by religion. Back to little Tia and her longing for solace in a melancholy midwestern sky, only because she ached from the beauty around her.

I was a serious, dreamy, imaginative, big-feelings kind of kiddo, and you can bet The Life of a Showgirl fresh off The Tortured Poets Department that she’s still inside of me. In fact, at the moment, she’s sitting right here, at a table for two in a tiny apartment above a small-town mercantile in Wisconsin.