Rest against fragmentation: Burnout,rage,feminist friendship,and the refusal of urgency

Burnout! That is an interesting word – one that the writers of this ‘what promises to be a beautiful piece and not at all stream of consciousness’ have recently become more familiar with, at least in our own bodies.

One thinks of burnout as a big, tangible thing that a doctor or psychologist tells you that you have and signs a piece of paper for you. What one doesn’t think of when one thinks of burnout is the slow, effervescent, non-tangible, ever-present feeling – maybe something similar to a Vitamin D3 deficiency, which, given that we are writing this in February in the Northern Hemisphere, we probably also have!

But this quiet, creeping burnout doesn’t arise in isolation; it is shaped by the environments we move through. To better understand it, we need to look at the systems that produce it. Working to improve the lives of women can be easily romanticized from the outside; it holds a promise for a rewarding journey. The development system takes advantage of this motivation that lies in bringing change. We forget we are still working within a patriarchal system that is often hostile to care. It starts with small changes we adapt in our personalities, changing the way we talk, the way we dress, and bending our boundaries. Even though there is a mismatch with our values, we begin to develop tolerance for contradictions and ambiguity. Then, slowly, as a virus spreads, we doubt ourselves and let others gaslight us. Suddenly, to realize we are living a double life, masking our true selves. We come to assimilate the dominant working culture, and this process of fragmenting and sustaining multiple versions of ourselves in a hostile environment has a high cost. Burnout emerges when the inner work of staying quiet, behaving, and accepting becomes nonstop. Burnout is not fragility; it is the refusal to continue fragmenting and masking.

When we fracture ourselves to survive, the first things to go are often the parts of us that make life feel textured and meaningful. Desire becomes inconvenient, rage becomes dangerous, grief becomes unproductive, and pleasure becomes suspicious. Fragmentation demands that we mute these sensations in favor of coherence or at least the appearance of it. Inside institutions that reward niceness, compliance, and a certain kind of ‘resilience’, these exiled feelings pool somewhere quiet inside the body, waiting. And like all things forced into silence, they eventually find their way out: sometimes as chronic pain, sometimes as apathy, sometimes as a sudden and inexplicable inability to keep pretending that everything is fine. Fragmentation is the strategy, but burnout is the cost of compliance. Among the feelings most quickly exiled in this process is anger.

Anger, particularly women’s anger, has been policed long before we ever entered the workplace. We’ve learned to metabolize it internally, to make it smaller, to turn it inward so it won’t disturb the room. But anger has always been one of our most precise forms of knowledge. It tells us when a boundary has been crossed, when care has been denied, and when our integrity has been asked to bend too far. Practicing feminist principles in environments that demand pleasantness over honesty means that our bodies often become the battleground where this anger lives. We feel it in the tightening of our shoulders when someone interrupts us; in the knot in the stomach after a meeting where something harmful was said but we smiled instead of naming it; in the exhaustion that follows yet another instance of being ‘the reasonable one’, or the one from whom ‘compliance’ is always expected.

And when we don’t practice the principles we believe in, when we swallow anger, when we participate in silencing ourselves, we feel it too. Shame, guilt, self-betrayal. The body keeps score not only of the violence done to us, but of the violence we inflict on ourselves in the name of staying employable, agreeable, or safe. In these circumstances, anger, when honored, becomes direction. When denied, it becomes burnout.

This is where the personal clashes with the political; the exhaustion in our bodies mirrors the inertia of the system around us. Particularly in the work we do, and the time we find ourselves in, there is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from witnessing waste, wasted resources, wasted potential, wasted opportunities to actually shift something. Working inside systems that speak the language of transformation but move with the speed of bureaucracy is maddening. You watch funds evaporate into reports no one reads; you watch political goodwill harden into indifference; you watch meaningful feminist insights get sanitized into ‘gender mainstreaming’ checklists.

One has come to realize that being haunted by waste is different from being overworked. It is being spiritually exhausted by the gap between what we know is necessary and what institutions are willing to risk. For people who joined the development sector to be a part of systemic transformation, it is burnout as heartbreak.

Exiting burnout requires consciousness: withdrawing from assimilation and total performance and reclaiming creativity, care, anger, and slowness as ways to reorient ourselves away from institutional demands. In the day-to-day, it looks like becoming a feminist killjoy in small, survivable ways, letting friction exist, and naming what hurts and creating spaces for love to thrive. However, love can feel like an impossible word in institutional spaces. But when we pay attention to the movements that sustain us, love is often what sits quietly underneath them. It is the force that helps us slow down enough to recognize our own humanity and the humanity of those beside us. Love, in this sense, is neither soft nor abstract. It is a daily practice of noticing, of making room, of choosing to center life rather than urgency.

It begins with ourselves, though this is often the hardest place to start. Many of us learned endurance before we learned ease, learned competence before comfort, learned to anticipate others’ needs before acknowledging our own. Burnout thrives in these habits. Love interrupts them. It asks simple questions that feel radical in systems that train us to override our limits: What do I need? What hurts? What can I offer without disappearing? This kind of self-relationship is not indulgent; it is the groundwork for being in community without collapsing inside it.

And then there is the question of receiving care. Many of us carry childhoods and histories where care was sporadic, conditional, or expensive. We learned to manage on our own, to stay useful, and to shrink our needs so we wouldn’t burden anyone. Receiving care asks us to gently unlearn these strategies. It requires a loosening, a willingness to be seen without providing something in return. It teaches us that connection is not a transaction, and that being tended to does not diminish our strength.

Learning to accept care is slow work. Sometimes it begins with something as simple as letting a friend cook for us, or admitting we are tired, or allowing silence between us without rushing to fill it. Every small act of receiving stretches our capacity to trust that we are held and NOT for what we produce, but for who we are.

When love shapes how we organize ourselves and our relationships, collective care stops feeling like a response to crisis and begins to feel like an orientation, a way of moving through the world that resists the erosion of our bodies, our friendships, and our political imagination.

The consciousness that helps us break from burnout can also come from shared experiences and shared meaning. While systems and institutions are forcing us to mask, feminist friendships offer a warm, safe space to be ourselves. They hold parts of us that institutions reject and allow contradictions to emerge without judgment or punishment. The care provided in these bonds does not require sameness; it celebrates authenticity. However, this care does not flow naturally, especially coming from histories of violence and hostile environments. There is a lot we have to unlearn to be at peace with ourselves and a lot to learn about how to give and receive care. Practicing feminist principles in friendship calls for vulnerability and openness to create a safe space, offering a mirror that reflects dignity and not productivity. Feminist friendships are not an escape from burnout; they constitute a space where we do not have to perform coherence. We are allowed to arrive fragmented, angry, sad, slow, and unsure and be held there. They offer collective care not by fixing us, but by celebrating us and refusing to treat our exhaustion as a failure.

But let us be clear, practicing feminist principles does not require likeability or being close with someone. One of the most damaging stereotypes around feminism is that we all need to be friends and get along. Care can exist without affection, and it can look like not humiliating another woman even when she is unkind, not using institutional power to punish other women, or refusing to use personal information or gossip to harm other women. Resisting the urge to align with power against another woman can bring solidarity and make new forms of community possible. Practicing feminist principles with women who are not close to us or we don’t like means refusing to reproduce patriarchal practices of competition, domination, or humiliation while holding our self-boundaries.

Creating a sense of safety for others, which is vital to challenging institutional loneliness, grows from this grounding. Safety is built through small gestures that accumulate: the pause before responding, the willingness to let someone speak slowly, the attention to what isn’t being said. It’s in the way we show that presence does not require performance.

Safety then emerges where care shows up, and people can feel that their vulnerability will not be used against them, where expressing fear, confusion, or anger doesn’t trigger punishment or distance, or where ‘mistakes’ or ‘errors’ are allowed to occur without being weaponized.

In these environments, intergenerational feminist friendships can have a way of steadying us because older and elder feminists often show what care looks like in practice: showing up when it matters, offering what they know without turning it into a lesson, sharing the weight of the day with a kind of ease that comes from years of tending to people they love. Being close to them reminds us that care can be slow and unhurried, that friendship can be a place of honesty, that love can be grounded and practiced instead of performed. They can hold their anger openly, not as something shameful but as part of what keeps them connected to the world, and being around that kind of clarity gives us permission to trust our own anger too. It can be something as simple as the ability to tell the world to fuck it. Or, to offer reassurance in the weight of self-doubt by saying ‘poor leadership is not contagious’.

None of this means they are untouched by burnout or moments of distance; it means that even within these realities, we find ways to meet each other, older, elder and younger, and hold one another through exhaustion, frustration, joy, and return. In these friendships, we learn that anger and love can exist in the same breath, that anger is not a bad emotion but a part of how we protect what we hold dear, and that being together across generations can make room for a kind of care that is both tender and strong enough to carry us.

A collective movement for rest as resistance cannot be built only through individual practice. Coming from a context like Mexico or India, where as children we rarely or never see our parents rest and take care of themselves, as they were busy and worried about providing our basic needs, rest itself is revolutionary. But as adults, we have come to understand that rest requires shared commitments toward a slower pace, refusal to urgency, and redistribution of care work. Rest becomes political when we care for each other’s rest. When practicing rest collectively, it is important to be aware that, like other practices, it is unevenly accessible. In the era of social media, it is very easy to fall into romanticizing care and demanding equal participation, while ignoring that care looks different for different generations, different bodies, class positions, migration, or care realities. Caring for each other’s rest means refusing comparison, honoring different capacities, noticing who is carrying too much, refusing to let exhaustion become the price of belonging, and resisting the impulse to standardize recovery.

Collective rest and resistance will only come from exploring rather than masking or performing, as this creates the space to not know, to change one’s mind, to learn and grow as we go. Contrary to punitive burnout culture, collective care and rest must be oriented toward reparation. These spaces benefit from consciousness that can separate harm from intention, making room for apology and changes in actions while refusing to make cancellation the automatic response to tension. Learning under conditions of burnout and exhaustion can be very fragile and could use this understanding and accountability without the opportunity to repair, which can easily reproduce punishment. Rest as resistance is a collective refusal of urgency as a norm to aspire to, and a commitment to rhythms that sustain life rather than extract from it.

Rest, then, becomes a feminist practice not because it withdraws us from the world, but because it allows us to remain in it together without breaking ourselves.

Maybe this is what we circle back to, after all the fragmentation and the rage and sorrow and the heartbreak. Nothing grand. Nothing heroic. Just a quiet invitation to stay with ourselves and each other a little longer than the systems around us would like and allow for. Resting even when it feels undeserved. Feeling anger without apologizing for it. Letting friendships hold what institutions drop. Trusting that slowness is not a failure but a way back to our own humanity and to nature. If we are learning anything, it’s that we can’t keep outrunning ourselves. So we rest. Not to escape the world, but to return to it with our full, messy, unfragmented selves. And to be our feminist selves in love, joy, sorrow, rage, care, song, music, dance, rest, and all the things patriarchy would not want us to do and feel. As we close, this is our invitation (borrowed from a friend): Practice today, the ancestor you’ll be tomorrow.