99 Days of Something #7 – Pride
As Pride month is about to start, and there are a few Pride marches and celebrations happening this weekend, I am once again reflecting on my relationship with Pride. I haven’t been to many. I have never thought of Pride as somewhere I really wanted to be or something I wanted to be part of. I love seeing the pictures of the events, I love reading about them and I love that Pride events exist in a form that is celebratory, full of joy and love. I also understand the importance of visibility and protest and we need that now more than probably ever in my lifetime. I love seeing social media feeds from friends and colleagues who are involved somehow. I love Pride looking in from the outside. I just don’t want to be there. So I feel conflicted about Pride because I feel like I really should want to be part of it. I feel like I should be seeking out those spaces, be visible, take up space. I feel like I should be able to find fun, joy and power in those spaces. I also feel like I should be there to acknowledge that Pride is not just a celebration of love but that it is also a protest, that it is intensely political and a really important form of resistance. But somehow I also feel like I just want to watch Pride from the outside. I absolutely want it to exist, I want to be part of it in the same way that I want to watch some sport on TV – it’ll be fun as long as I don’t actually have to be there or participate.
I realise that is possibly selfish. I also know that it comes from a position of privilege. I don’t need Pride. I never have. I have always had support, I have always been seen for all of me. I never had to hide and have always been able to just be me. So finding and being part of a community and express that through events like Pride have never been important for my existence or my well being. Couple that with my dislike of big crowds, indifference about a lot of the music played and acts featured and generally having other things I’d rather do at the weekend, Pride never makes it to the top of the list of priorities. And then I feel guilty about that. I was vaguely thinking about joining the Leeds Pride march in July because it feels like I should, but I no longer have to worry about that as something else has come up on that date.
I have become increasingly aware of the importance of visibility and of resistance. I am conscious that as a pretty successful out gay woman I have both power and responsibility and a certain vulnerability. I don’t know if it is just getting older and wiser (ahem) that gives me some of that perspective or whether it is more to do with the political climate and all our rights being under threat in a way that I haven’t really experienced before. My consciousness of s28 for example was limited maybe because I didn’t go to school in England until I was 16 and I remember sex education, for example, being way way more useful in Germany. I don’t actually remember anything about ‘non traditional families’ but then there was already a lot on the school curriculum that I thought was nonsense. For example, I remember being one of only 2 kids in my class at grammar school whose parents were not seemingly happily married and together. And that was positioned as the absolute norm. All this talk of perfect nuclear families versus problematic single parent families made no sense to me because I was quite happy in my ‘broken’ family. I was surrounded by diverse family structures and living arrangements. In other words, I already understood that curricula in some ways are always political and always tell a particular story and that story might not at all reflect mine. I might not have been able to express that but I knew there was so much more to the world than the things we were talking about at school from a really early age. So because in my life outside school I was exposed to lots of different ways of living and thinking and because I was also encouraged to read a lot and to think and to not just accept what teachers or authority figures said, I was not looking to school to teach me anything about how families worked or who I was or should be. More and more I realise that while I am sure I have my share of internalised homophobia, it’s pretty limited and I have been incredibly lucky to have experienced exclusion, non acceptance, hate etc as rare exceptions rather than as something that is a constant in my life. In addition, for a lit of my adult life the story has sort of been one of progress. It saw s 28 abolished, it saw the introduction of civil partnerships and then equal marriage, it saw equality in adoption rights, the Gender Recognition Act was introduced, discrimination was outlawed. I am not saying that things were great but we seem to be heading in the right direction. I think taking all of those things together, resulted in it taking me an embarrassingly long time to realise that protest, resistance, visibility and using my voice are really important. Just because being gay and out has not been a struggle for me, doesn’t mean I am not part of the struggle.
But what does that actually mean in practical terms. What can I do that feels meaningful and doable. I am working on that and through June I want to really consciously think about that and maybe explore more queer literature, art and film (suggestions always welcome). I will continue to share snippets of my life and while I never hide and think I am fairly open, maybe I can be more explicit about who I mean when I see ‘we’ or about how I think about the family and life Kath and I have build. I will make more an effort to seek out queer spaces or queer owned businesses. And I will keep showing up as authentically as I can and I will try and really notice the occasions when I hesitate to do that, where the inevitable ongoing coming out that just happens when you chat with new people about your life (‘What does your husband do…, erm, he doesn’t exist) feels awkward or not really safe. Because those are the moments that require resistance and challenge. Those are the moments that doing it anyway is more important than ever – particular in my position of privilege and almost always physical safety.
Anyway, Happy Pride month. Let’s celebrate and protest in equally powerful measures in whatever way we can. I’d love to hear your plans or suggestions for other things I might like to try. Oh and also, here’s my ‘we’:
99 Days of Something – #4: More About Rest
Ah well, yes – I didn’t get very far with the 99 Days of Something series did I. But I do miss the discipline of writing daily and I do need a kick up the backside to get some writing bits finished and writing helps with balance and rest. So the aim is to write something every day and record it here. Sometimes that might be writing for work, sometimes that might be some creative writing and sometimes it might just be the blog. But write I will. When I did the 100 Days of Wonder series, I structured the post around photos and that seemed to work really well – so maybe I start there to see how it goes.
I took this picture of Storm this morning. I like it for all sorts of reasons – the blue sky, her looking into the distance seemingly ignoring me completely, the tree in the background. I also like it because it was a very brief moment in the middle of chaos – she was being a parkour cat round the garden and paused to catch her breath before bouncing out of the greenhouse guttering onto the glass roof that covers our patio and then running across the other side of the greenhouse and jumping from there to the summer house roof and disappearing across the fence at the back of our garden. And then she appeared again doing some sort of variation of that loop. Now she’s fast asleep.
That, and scrolling through the blog and seeing some of the 100 Days of Wonder posts and realising that I feel more rested after this weekend than I did when I had a whole week off, made me reflect on my last post and on rest. Storm is good at resting. Like most cats really. She goes bonkers, she eats well, she plays, she takes care of herself and then she sleeps. When she was running around the garden and bouncing off buildings she seemed so joyful. She was just having fun. And she was just doing her thing. The other cats stayed out of her way, watching her with a mix of fear, admiration and disdain. She doesn’t care.
So as I sat in the sun, tidying up one of our little alpine tubs and watching a tiny little bee on a heuchera flower, I thought about what was different this weekend. I had assumed I would be more tired. I didn’t sleep well all week. Stress levels were high, emotional energy was drained and I was frustrated about my calf still being niggly. I almost expected to feel worse. But I didn’t. So what’s different. Well I suspect the weather helps. It’s warm and sunny and has been all weekend. Sunlight helps. The second things is that I have actually done some stuff that feels productive in a none work way. I deep cleaned the kitchen on Saturday. While somehow cleaning the kitchen always feels future because it almost immediately needs it again, the deep clean was well overdue and it does look and feel much better now. On Sunday we went out for breakfast and had a walk round Harlow Carr gardens and bought some plants. We also did a fair bit of life admin organising ourselves a bit and that felt good. I did yoga and moved a little testing out the calf and just doing what feels good. I have drunk lots more water. I always have been terrible at drinking enough but over the last few days I have really tried and I do actually feel better. I went to the gym this morning, I pottered in the garden a bit and I have made plans for an outrageous LEGO purchase that will be silly fun. I have paused and noticed things, the variety of bees, the colours outside, the difference in temperature between the front and back garden… I have watched the cats play and lounge. I have done what Storm did in condensed form this morning – I moved, I had yummy food, I have played and been silly, I have looked after myself and I have slept better. This long weekend so far has been much more about balance, about doing and being in ways that support each other. No ‘all or nothing’ in sight. Less scrolling for no reason, more deliberate breathing and noticing.
I had coffee in the shady bit of our garden when I had finished the alpine tubs and realised how much I have got out of the habit of doing nothing at all. Just sitting and sipping my coffee almost felt alien. I, like so many of us, usually have my phone out when I am just sitting. That’s not doing nothing. That doesn’t let the brain drift and do its thing. Sitting watching, sipping, listening, breathing for 10 minutes was so much more restful than any amount of time scrolling could ever be. And I’m not saying there isn’t a place for scrolling, sometimes I find it helpful to stop myself fixating on one thing or to switch tasks but the trick is not to get stuck scrolling. It takes effort.
So what is actually different? Maybe it is really simple, I feel more present, more connected to myself (I don’t quite know what I mean either but that’s the closes I can come with words) and more open to seeing the joy and wonder in the every day and that leads me to a better balance and better prioritisation between all the things that make up this rollercoaster we call life. Let’s see how I manage balance when I also have to work. Achieving it during a long weekend seems a little like cheating but I have to start somewhere!
What does Rest Actually Look Like?
I realised this week that I have clearly forgotten how to rest. I know the answer to the question posed will be very different for us all but I have been thinking a lot about rest this week, partly because I am really struggling to rest constructively. I am on annual leave so that might be why it has come into focus now but actually, I have been thinking about rest and what that actually means for a while. I have been thinking about rest and recovery in running (for how that is or isn’t going, pop over to my running blog), about rest during busy work days and weeks and rest during periods of annual leave or even just weekends. The thing is, I am incredibly good at doing nothing but awful at resting. I sleep a lot, that’s probably a good thing for rest but that’s where the positives end really. I am trying to remember when I last felt properly rested and I can’t really remember. I am as prone to doom scrolling as the best of us and I can loose hours doing absolutely nothing in a pretty mindless way. I can be a bit all or nothing with pretty much everything. Running is a good example lately – back to back days, going all in for a few days or weeks and then nothing for a while. Same with yoga, the gym, strength training. It’s also the same with writing for example – lots all at once with focus that makes time vanish and then nothing…I can work long hours and then crash out. And some of this is just how I work. I like intensity and then down time, I work better in bursts, I feel sharper, more focused and frankly just better at what I do when I do it in intense bursts. The problem isn’t intensity, or the peaks and troughs. The problem is that in an academic role, in the current state of the sector, that intensity never gives. My nervous system has learned to stay at the intensity, the bursts aren’t bursts, they’re constant and the peaks aren’t followed by troughs, there’s just another peak. Downtime has all but vanished. I have forgotten how to properly rest. Maybe we all have collectively. And by rest I absolutely do not mean crashing out in front of the TV or scrolling through endless reels that tell us how to get our life back on track after a workday filled with adding more things to the to do list than you ticked off it.
So what does rest actually look like for me? Can I remember? Let’s start with running and the physical rest needed to run well. The all or nothing approach to exercise obviously doesn’t work. I used to not only know this but also understand it in a way that allowed me to listen to my body much more than I do now. Through marathon training, and particularly through the 2019 Dopey Challenge training, I really understood the difference between good tired and dangerous tired. I knew when to rest and the rest was intentional, mindful and constructive. It was build into the plan so my initial cues came from the plan but I also quickly adapted to being ok with extra rest days, shortening distances or splitting them over two runs, adjusting weights if I didn’t feel strong or doing some additional yoga if it felt good, adding some time on feet if I felt fresh. In addition, the training, even the really long miles, felt like a rest from work. The physical effort provided the counterbalance to the brain effort of work, the movement the anti-dote to sitting most of the day. I appreciate that as I am getting older and now that I am far less fit, I need to adjust the training, I need longer to recover in-between workouts, I can’t run hard on back to back days and expect to feel great. But I am struggling to settle into a rhythm that works because nothing feels quite balanced and because I don’t, on any level, feel rested. Physical rest and mental rest are so linked for me (and probably all of us) that when I am not mentally rested, I can be as physically rested as is possible but I will still feel tired, grumpy and unable to commit to the exercise. Tired for me is rarely physical – but when it is regularly, everything is better. So I think the first thing to note about rest, is that I feel most rested when I am settled into a rhythm that somehow balances work, exercise, the outdoors, whimsical play and silliness and some sort of creative outlet which could be writing or could be reading or listening to music or whatever. That balance is hard to achieve and sometimes achieving that balance feels like another thing to do which then makes it not a balance at all but a chore.
During this week off, we have been trying to sort some photos so that we might eventually catch up a bit with photo books. We have mainly been looking at the Disney photos from 2023 and 2025. What strikes me looking back at those pictures is how tired we look in both sets. In 2023 we were so tired that we didn’t start the marathon. We were dangerous tired. In 2025 we didn’t start the marathon either but we had completed the first 3 days of the Dopey Challenge. Of course for both we were under-trained but that wasn’t the main reason for not starting those races. We were not properly rested. We were dangerous tired and most of that tiredness was mental. As it happens I did injure my knee during the half in 2025. Probably not a coincidence. Anyway, on both occasions, we came back a little more rested but not re-set. On both occasions we didn’t really break the intensity cycle. I contrast that with earlier trips and maybe particularly the 2019 trip. Physically I am not sure I have ever been as tired as I was during serious Dopey training. But it was good tired. It was tired that could be slept away. It was the sort of tired that was directly linked to physical activity, not the sort of tired that just is. Of course we were physically tired after running 48.6 miles in 4 days but at the end of the trip, I also felt more rested than I probably have since then. Mentally we went into the trip far less tired and we came back rested. I think even further back to our Australia trip in 2018. We took all of July and we saw lots, experienced lots, did lots, and came home glowing and rested and happy.
Today, Friday and the last day of my week off (I am working an applicant visit day tomorrow) and I finally feel like my mind is not constantly being pulled back to work related things. Given the state of my un-rest (deliberate choice of the word here), I don’t think a week at home is enough to re-set and actually get to rest. I am still in the shutting down apps phase before you even get to full log off never mind re-start. Things that have helped me this week have been LEGO builds, focusing on being present with the cats, morning coffee outside breathing in the cool spring air and some gentle exercise. I thought I would write and read a lot more but I didn’t want to. I didn’t feel like I had the concentration. I also thought I would scroll less and play more, be more whimsical but somehow, I don’t feel like I really got there, like I really came down from the intensity of the world for that to happen. I stayed, mostly, in serious mode. A week is not enough for a system re-set. But a week is what I have had. So I do need to think about what rest looks like in the day to day. Of course that includes longer periods of not working but if I go into those, like I have into this week and so many trips over the last few years, on high alert, exhausted and stuck in intensity mode, they are not going to be enough to establish and keep a balance. It can’t be all or nothing because that’s not rest, that’s a crash. And we’ve done the burn out and crash thing a couple of times now – not fun, not something I want to repeat.
So what might rest actually look like day to day. My job is not going to get any less intense. I could of course just leave the job – and actually, I really could but bizarrely, despite everything, I don’t actually want to. I actually like quite a big proportion of my job. So if the job won’t get less intense, I need to learn to rest within that intensity. I need to look back at the things that used to work for me and re-learn them. The first is maybe to limit work to it’s place. It’s just a job. I can both care deeply about it and still see it as just a job. I am an academic. It’s part of my identity and who I am but it is not everything. I am really good at my job, sometimes maybe it’s ok to say no, to not people please and to let opportunities whoosh past in the way that generally declines do now. I think I will put a new post-it note on my computer to remind me that it is just a job. If I can contain work better, I create space for the other restful things: Having an exercise plan that is built around constructive rest (yes I know how that sounds but it works) and not giving work my best time are two obvious ones. I like early mornings, I want to spend them sipping coffee in the sun with the cats roaming around. I do not need to be at my computer at 7am. Other things I sort of reserve for days off when there really is no need. I like the play and type of concentration required by building LEGO sets. I like the whimsy of arranging the built sets in our house. We have so many large scale sets, why not have one on the go and do a little bit each day (again, it does not have to be all or nothing, I don’t have to build everything in a day!). I love how regular yoga makes me feel, so why not get on the mat every day instead of scrolling. I miss reading for pleasure. Maybe I need to buy more trashy novels to just get lost in terrible stories and accept that not every book I read has to do anything intellectual. Maybe sometimes my brain needs flawed story telling that is easy to read and requires no thought. All easily said and easily written down. Not always easy to do. A tired mind full of un-rest easily lies to us, I am easily convinced that the best place is the sofa – it probably rarely is.
To answer the question I started with, I don’t think I know what rest looks like for me at the moment. I don’t really understand the whims of this perimenopausal body, it’s energy fluctuations, random aches and pains and non existent temperature regulation. So figuring out physical rest around exercise is going to take a little time. As for mental rest and feeling rested, I need to unlearn some bad habits and re-learn some good ones. I was better at the ebbs and flows of academic life – I think maybe partly because there were ebbs and flows in the job where there are none now. But I was good at taking time back, thriving in intense periods and slowing down, being more playful in others and I did that in much shorter and sustainable cycles. Maybe it was easier in more junior and teaching focused roles than it is now, maybe the sector has got worse but the basics should still work. The intensity of the job hasn’t dropped at all since last summer, and it won’t. But mine has to. Maybe saying that out loud, putting it down here is step one to taking one little step at a time to real constructive rest that involves far less doing nothing and much more mindful and deliberate being in the doing of whimsical, playful and ultimately restful activities. The pictures dotted throughout this blog, show some of the things that made me smile and pause this week. They are the things that matter.
How do you rest? Help me learn again.
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