Most authors wouldn’t love hearing that you fell asleep while reading their book, but with a big laugh, Evie Muir accepts it as a compliment.
Radical Rest: Notes on Burnout, Healing and Hopeful Futures is a long way from boring. Drawing on Black feminist theory and fiction, interviews with queer and disabled activists of colour, and her own life, Evie writes movingly and persuasively on a far-reaching tangle of interconnected horrors: burnout, exhaustion, grief, trauma, racism. But she has also filled her debut with descriptions of rest that are so luscious, compelling and joyful that it lulled me, a person usually incapable of napping no matter how tired they are, into the most perfect 20-minute sleep, my open copy rising and falling gently on my stomach.
Skin Deep first met Evie when she wrote for our online season of stories exploring community infrastructures, LOCAL, so we were excited to speak with her about the process of writing about burnout under racial capitalism, and the structural, imaginative, world-changing work needed to free us from the conditions that cause this complex and widely-misunderstood harm.
We originally spoke via voicenote for a mini Q&A in the Skin Deep newsletter, but Evie’s answers were so generous and full that we decided to publish a more in-depth version of our conversation here. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Skin Deep: First of all, congratulations on getting Radical Rest out into the world! We saw that you celebrated publication day with a wild swim – very on brand. To begin a long way away from that serene river scene, we wanted to ask you how you found the process of writing the book, since it’s a famously gruelling thing to do. Were you worried about burning out all over again while you were writing? How did you avoid that?
Evie Muir: The truth is I didn’t manage to not burn out. In fact, I failed miserably! I burned out three times in the year and a half it took me to write Radical Rest. In hindsight, I think it was inevitable, because of the conditions that writers are required to work within when creating something so personal and political that just does not align with the capitalist system that is publishing. Even though I had a really lovely publisher and agent, that didn’t negate it.
I was also unearthing, excavating so much trauma – rightly or wrongly – to put on the page. I was processing decades of stuff, pulling things up from deep within me that might take years to process in therapy, but doing it in this rushed, almost voyeuristic way in order to communicate to an audience. So it was this combination of doing such lived-experience-led work, but within a system that doesn’t value your time or your health.
I had so much love and support throughout the process, and I had this toolkit that I could reach for: weekly therapy, embodied practices, wild swimming. But even that didn’t keep burnout at bay, because of the weight of what I was unearthing and how these flimsy capitalist infrastructures are unable to hold that weight. So in many ways the process of writing the book exposed and validated everything I was trying to say; it’s the systems we’re in that make us burn out.
My intention is to try and communicate this as much as possible, not only to be transparent and honest – although I do think that’s important – but also, on a personal level, to continue reminding myself of the reality of that experience. I’m conscious that the more I move away from all the deadlines and staring at my screen all day every day, the less severe it feels. I think it’s a very human process – and a trauma response – to forget. Luckily, I have people around me to remind me of how worried they were, how low and scary a place I ended up in. So yeah, that’s the reality of writing a book about burnout.
SD: As much as the book is rooted in your personal experiences and expertise, it equally revolves around interviews with activists and organisers – including folks from Bare Minimum Collective, Sex and Rage, Healing Justice London and Civic Square. How important was it for you to include these voices?
EM: The interviews were so significant, and a key part of the book from the very start. I felt quite uncomfortable initially at embarking on this potentially very isolating solo project because my work normally is extremely community-orientated. So it’s been really special to be able to involve and platform the wisdom of people whose work I’ve admired and been influenced by for years.
SD: Is there one particularly powerful or paradigm-shifting thing one of your interviewees shared with you, that you can share with us?
EM: If I was to choose one person to highlight, it would probably be Azekel, the founder of Black Trans Foundation. A few years ago, they had to pause operations because two of their team, including Azekel, burned out so badly that they lost the ability to walk. And I think that really upturns everything we’ve been led to believe about burnout: that it’s just this inconvenient tiredness, that if we have a couple of days off work we can return to these really harmful institutions, that we can just bounce back.
Azekel shares this warning, which is short and simple, but really powerful: “if you don’t rest, your body will make you rest.” I think it speaks to how embodied the trauma of capitalism is, and how rest is a revolutionary priority.
“The more that we are able to rest in nature, the more the fractures or cracks in society become clearer. We’re able to see just how incompatible we are with capitalist society, just how harmful and unnatural it is.”
Me and Azekel first bonded over wild swimming, so for our interview we went for a swim first at their local pool before going back to their flat. It was a privilege to be invited to witness Azekel at home, given how uncomfortable and terrifying it can be for disabled people to be seen and witnessed, and that privilege allowed me to understand the practical reality of living with burnout: how it impacted how they fed themselves; how they weren’t able to access their flat which wasn’t wheelchair accessible; how they were navigating Universal Credit and weren’t able to pay for the care they needed.
Their experience really takes this airy concept of burnout – which the NHS gives a really shoddy definition to – and it lifts it off the page. Their words help translate it into a lived experience, a structural issue, a health issue and a political issue.
SD: As well as being a writer, you’re a founder of Peaks of Colour, a nature-for-healing grassroots community group by and for people of colour based in the Peak District. Can you speak about the relationship between burnout and connection to the wild environment, especially for global majority people?
EM: I think about this in two ways. Our experiences of burnout can be seen as mirroring the burnout that our planet and our natural landscapes are also experiencing; there are parallels between our own embodied collapse and environmental collapse. I think when we can see ourselves as being of nature as opposed to just in it, then it becomes easy to see burnout as an entire ecosystem problem, as opposed to a strictly human problem.
That being said, if you were to zoom in on the experience of burnout for people of colour in particular – and in the book I particularly focus on activists of colour, queer activists of colour, disabled activists of colour – I think we not only see the magnitude of the problem, but also how much the solution relies on reconnecting with nature. Once we can establish that relationship with nature, we can immediately understand what’s missing. The more that we are able to rest in nature, the more the fractures or cracks in society become clearer. We’re able to see just how incompatible we are with capitalist society, just how harmful and unnatural it is. We can really start to lean into what our real embodied needs are.
SD: You write about that realisation in the book, specifically the experience of being able to grieve your grandparents for the first time as a result of connecting deeply with a natural space – something that social structures and norms in this country fail to enable and even actively prohibit. You write: “grief weighs lighter when held in community, and lighter still when that community is held in nature.”
EM: The more I do this work myself, deepening my relationship with my local landscape in particular, it just becomes so glaringly obvious – there’s nowhere else to turn. The society we are living in just feels so nonsensical and incomprehensible. I begin to feel more and more detached from it the more I feel part of nature. So nature is not just helping us heal; it’s highlighting exactly what our needs are and how we should be meeting them, and therefore what direction we should be moving in, the future we should be building.
SD: This idea of building a radically different future – one that doesn’t grind people into the ground – is a central focus of the book. Who were your inspirations for this imaginative work?
EM: I’ve rekindled an obsession with Black speculative fiction author Octavia E. Butler (Peaks of Colour is doing a walkshop series around her book The Parable of the Sower) and she was asked in an interview once: how do you predict the future? And she said: by looking at the past. She was able to predict trends in politics and economics by looking at historical cycles, particularly events surrounding the second world war and the rise of fascism. And I think subconsciously that’s what I was doing throughout writing Radical Rest.
I knew from the start that this book was going to be rooted in Black feminist practice. That’s where I’ve always gotten a lot of my hope and aspirations about the future: through Black feminist writers who came before us, who laid the foundations of hope, who already built structures for this work way before I was even born.
SD: At Skin Deep we’ve always been interested in how marginalised communities can dream up new systems and ways of being despite living in a world that actively diminishes our capacity to think beyond crisis and survival. How did you experience that process of imagining futures while struggling to survive in the present?
EM: I acutely relate to that idea of being so stuck in the present conditions that it becomes difficult to think about the future – particularly in moments when I’m triggered, disassociating, feeling blinding rage or consumed by grief. Those experiences really root you in the present, so you can’t see beyond the fog of this second. Never mind that you know this panic attack will pass in half an hour, never mind that you’ve lived through this before – there’s nothing in the world that will convince you that you aren’t dying right now.
That embodied experience of mental ill health and burnout can be understood as a very political state of being; when we are in our trauma, we are physically unable to think of the future. We can’t think of a future ten minutes from that point – let alone a future, generations from now, that could be better, free, joyous.
I think the practice of radical imagination is not just this lofty idea of dreaming beyond our present realities. It’s a practice that can help us deal with the present too: knowing that this panic attack will pass on the one hand, but also believing that there are potential systems in the future where our response to living isn’t panic attacks.
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SD: Going back to your writing process, Radical Rest is described as a work of creative nonfiction, and it’s full of lyrical language and poetic moments, mixing in fragments of diaries and other texts you’ve made. Can you talk about how this creative approach helped you think through and analyse the ideas in the book?
EM: I think for a while I forgot to approach it creatively and felt really lost in the process as a result. That shifted for me when I met artist Nathanial Telemanque who has this artistic practice called sequencing. I was feeling like I wasn’t writing the book ‘right’ (whatever that means) but when I explained my process and the book’s structure to him – with each chapter based on an emotion – he immediately gave it a name: thematic sequencing. Having someone give what I was doing a term helped affirm it as a valid creative practice, which I was then able to more consciously tap into and feel confident in.
Funnily enough it’s only since finishing the book that I’ve been able to be more creative and experimental in my writing. There was something about that capitalist model of producing the book, writing to deadlines, that stifled the creativity. Without that looming pressure and expectation, my creative writing practice has flourished – from nature journaling to finally establishing a writing practice that I feel addresses rage and grief.
“I learned recently that birds only sing when they’re in a place they feel safe… So in the future I imagine, the trees will be full of birdsong because we’ll be so safe, and the birds will be constantly reminding us of that.”
SD: Other than your own book, of course, what books, films, shows or albums would you recommend as a balm for any burned out bodyminds reading this?
EM: I don’t read for escape, but as a way to understand, so these might not feel like a balm!
Definitely Parable of the Sower – so timely and so mind-blowing. It helped me find a way of relating to the darkest parts of myself and the world in a really hopeful and loving way. We, The Heartbroken by Gargi Bhattacharyya is a creative and humbling exploration of grief as a collective responsibility; it’s the one common experience that we all share, so if we were able to find common ground in our grief, it could be the site of true collective power.
I wrote about My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh in my book as a very interesting way of looking at rest, capitalism and grief. To me, the protagonist is an extremely grief-stricken character who is so inept at being able to hold that grief, that she essentially burns out. The only way she feels she can exist is to completely shut herself off from the world. What’s that trend that went round? Bedrotting, it’s that. I think it’s an extreme twist on something we’ve all felt: not being able to cope with the world.
I’m really bad at listening to music – especially new music – because it can completely sway my mood, so I have to be conscious of how sensitive I am to it. But Solange’s Seat At The Table, and any Sampha album at the minute. I listen to the same things over and over again, that are either comforting or that I know I’m safe with emotionally. Those two are a balm for sure.
I watch TV to escape, but definitely not the kind of thing you’d describe as a balm. Farzana Khan said once that the nervous system takes something like six months to recover from watching a horror film, or police violence – something triggering and hyper-sensitive on a screen. Which is always the things I’ll watch! I love, like, a Scandi mystery murder police drama. Love copaganda, hate cops. And I love horrors.
SD: Liberation coach Katherine O’Garro shared the other day that she imagines her future descendents eating mangoes naked by a river – that’s what she’s working towards. In a snapshot, how do you picture the world your descendents will live in?
EM: I’ve been mulling this over all day, and I don’t have a very different answer! Truly when I imagine future descendants, they are also by a river, and there are fruit trees surrounding them. I only heard this recently, but past governments planted only male trees in cities because it’s the females that grow fruit, and they didn’t want people to access free food. (And having only pollen-producing male trees is now the reason everyone has such bad hayfever.) So by this future river there are acres of fruit-laden trees that we can eat from freely.
Something else I learned recently is that birds only sing when they’re in a place they feel safe. I often think of these nature-led tools we can use: when the revolution comes, everything collapses and we’re rebuilding, how will we know we’re safe? So in this future I imagine, the trees will be full of birdsong because we’ll be so safe, and the birds will be constantly reminding us of that.
Radical Rest: Notes on burnout, healing and hopeful futures by Evie Muir (Elliott & Thompson) is available now in hardback and ebook.
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