I lived a few months to live alone to realize that I don’t know how to rest. When I have a rare free afternoon, I start deep cleaning. I cleaned corners, I cleaned the day before. I empty drawers and fill them up. I scrub with intensity, not because they are dirty, but because I cannot bear the idea of not doing anything. My unrest dresses up as responsibility. A silent rule is coded somewhere in my body: calm is deserved, not accepted.
This discomfort is not personal. It is produced. In one of her essays, Judith Butler argues that gender is something we do, not something we are. This performance takes place in subtle rituals, like the calm panic that I feel when I am not occupied.
Femininity, household work and calm
The femininity in many Indian households is tried out first Work. Not only physical work, but also emotional vigilance. The inability to sit, take a seat, waste time begins at home.
Source: web
Watch mothers who float about dining tables instead of eating with the family. Watch older sisters who “help” while brothers are “busy”. Watch how women in public space always justify their presence, buy something, accompany someone or come somewhere. Always with purpose. For women, peace is never without a story. It has to be explained, apologized or shortened.
Internalized expectations
Even now, when I lay down, a list appears to me in my head. Did I answer this e -mail? Did I read enough today? Should I write? I rarely wonder if I’m tired. Fatigue was never a valid reason. Only results are important. This is the condition to split up female under patriarchy: they are trained to measure their value through the service.
Even now, when I lay down, a list appears to me in my head. Did I answer this e -mail? Did I read enough today? Should I write? I rarely wonder if I’m tired. Fatigue was never a valid reason. Only results are important.
Sara Ahmed, in Lead a feminist lifeWrites: “If you uncover a problem, pose a problem.” The decision to stop, not to produce, not to repair or carry out is not read as a need, but as a resistance. And that is exactly what makes silence wrong.
The urge to demonstrate usefulness lingers in rooms in which nobody is watching. My house remains untouched by the guests for weeks, but I’m still worried about what it looks like. Not for others, but for me. As if the disorder of the shelf says something about my value. As if my body, which is quiet, would announce a failure of the discipline.
When I grew up, I saw how the women rarely really rested in my family. My mother folded laundry when he fesses. My grandmother summed up prayers while cooking. Even her silence had a function. Nothing was not part of the script.
Fii
I have recorded this rhythm over time. If I have a slow day now, I find tasks to justify them. The urge to prove that I have “deserved” my time feels inherited as if a calm heritage would go from one woman to another.
Feminist spaces, calm and business
Even feminist spaces often reproduce this glorification of bustle. We welcome multitasking and creation of survival. We transform resilience into aesthetics. The calm is rarely used as your own right. The slow, calm, ordinary act to do nothing, does not make it to slogans. But as Audre Lorde emphasizes, “it is not self -pleasure; it is self -sufficiency.” But self -preservation is not instinctive for women. It has to be learned. Slow. Guilt -conscious.
Even feminist spaces often reproduce this glorification of bustle. We welcome multitasking and creation of survival. We transform resilience into aesthetics. The calm is rarely used as your own right. The slow, calm, ordinary act to do nothing, does not make it to slogans.
Every time I try to hold, I have to struggle with a internal belief that I waste time. This belief has consequences. It plays away in my creative life. Instead of writing a poem, I folded clothes. Instead of sitting with an idea, I sweep the floor. The silence that could nourish thinking will be eliminated to something.
I often wonder what I could do if I allowed myself to bore. Virginia Woolf asked about “a room in itself”, but I think we also need our own time. Unplanned time, not balanced time. Unused, unproductive time. Time in which nothing is expected.
Practice
Mary Oliver once asked: “Tell me what do you have with your only wild and precious life?” I definitely don’t want to say: “Clean the bookshelf again.” Sometimes I light a candle and put on the floor just to practice silence. Sometimes I fail. The urge to do something wins. But slowly I learn to sit with the discomfort. Remain. To believe that nothing can do. Not as a preparation, not as a recovery, but as a presence.
This is not a moral essay. I don’t ask women to move. I ask why we cannot afford to stop. Why does every action have to be productive? Why does every hour have to be justified? What does it mean to live without urgency? These questions are in the heart of my feminist practice.
Silence shouldn’t be radical. But for many women it is. And for the moment it is my quiet rejection of being quiet, even for a moment.