Rest as Resistance - with Nancy Lee
Excerpts from Episode 5 of art workers podcast with Nathalia Morales-Evanks
The art workers podcast focuses on artists and arts administrators who identify as black, indigenous or people of color. Here you can listen to inspiring stories about BIPOC artists and administrators, how they got started, and how they are working and navigating the arts industry.
Nancy Lee (she/they) worked in art museums and organizations for 15 years in Communications roles for MOCA, GYOPO, and the Hammer. She left that career for a year-long sabbatical, experimenting with rest, play, volunteering, and other interests. Lee is also a self-taught artist and lives in their hometown of Los Angeles.
NL: This idea of having to earn a rest was something I was really trying to resist.
We've talked about Trisha Hersey's Rest as Resistance. That book and that way of thinking really affected me and influenced me and inspired me that it's important to rest.
Not only is it something I'm interested in, but it's also radical to rest and important to be different.
If I actually disagree with workaholism and hypercapitalism. If I'm not signed up for that, then there's something else I could be making. I think that's what I'm trying to do with this sabbatical. I'm trying to be different.
I think once you know even one person who's doing something different, then it makes it seem possible.
NL: Ultimately, the reason I quit was because I just stopped caring about work. It just stopped occupying the center of my validation, my ego, my value system.
It just started becoming less and less important…and that shift had been happening, but I think the pandemic really accelerated things I was going to come to realize eventually. The devaluing of work and the higher priority of the people in my life. And as I was changing my value system very rapidly, I realized, "Oh, I can leave. I don't need to stay here.” And of course it's scary because I had never not worked before...
NME: As an adult.
NL: If I wasn't working, I was trying to get a job, or trying to find work…it was very work-oriented for all of my adult life. And to not be that anymore felt really risky, but it also felt like something I had to try. I kept thinking about rest. I was so curious about sabbatical, but I didn't know how to do it.
There aren't really models for sabbatical.
NME: Outside of academia.
NL: And even that, I am very suspicious of an academic sabbatical because they are still working.
NME: They have to do a book or something else.
NL: Yeah. That’s working too! Okay, you're not teaching, but you're working on research. It's still work. And I thought REST was the compelling part of a sabbatical.
NL: [When I left the museum] everybody was very professional about respecting the boundary and my timing. And I mutually had given them everything they needed to continue on without me. I didn't want them to freak out because I was gone. I wanted them to just keep going and for the ship to operate smoothly. And it did!
And because I had done so many years of separating myself from the work it actually doesn't bother me when things run well without me.
I think that's a sign of a good exit. Like things shouldn't fall apart without one person.
NME: That's so interesting that you say that. Because my mom worked at LA Unified headquarters for 35 years. And she was really freaked out about retirement because she's like, “What is my team gonna do without me? Like they're gonna fall apart!”
People will figure it out. I think your ego wants to tell you're irreplaceable.
NL: Yes, yes.
NME: Life will go on. You talk about endings. Like even through death, usually family members, we go on. And I think that that's something beautiful because it also takes off so much weight off of the individual.
NL: Yes, it frees you to actually focus on what matters. But I think our workaholic culture and this drive to always produce, produce, produce…it's reinforcing the ego. So not only is it personal to me, it's society telling you no you're only as useful as what you bring to the table in terms of value, skills, whatever. And it's hard to swim against that current. If you're not really intentional about being different, then of course you become a workaholic. Because that's the behavior that's rewarded.
NME: And you burn out.
NL: Even when I walked away from museums I wasn't sure I was walking away forever because I thought, 'What if I miss it?’ You know I've been in this thing for 10 plus years. It was so important to me when I was 18. It was my dream. And then it wasn't my dream.
And to acknowledge I'm so different now. And to walk away knowing I could change again.
NME: I think that's so important to say, to give yourself permission to change. Especially as an adult. I feel like when we're students, undergrads, graduate students, there's all of these like internships you could take in different fields, in different places. And then all of a sudden you have to choose your job. And it's important to say it's okay that what you chose in your past maybe isn't serving you now. Because we're all…every year, every day is like a new beginning and a new change.
NL: YUP. I think that openness is really at the center of even the sabbatical. I don't know what's going to happen. And I think that's scary for adults. It certainly wasn't comfortable for me either. But I think that's true every day. We just kind of trick ourselves into these patterns.
NME: Well it's comfort, right?
NL: Yeah. You think it's predictable so then it's safe.
NME: No stress.
NL: But anything can happen any day all the time. That's just life!
NME: Yeah, yeah.
NL: So I'm like okay every day is uncertain anyway so I might as well try the thing that I can't stop thinking about. And last year my theme for the year was curiosity and I think that also had given me the courage to leap. Okay who knows what's gonna happen? Maybe I'll have to come back [to work] in three months because I can't afford it, because I miss it. There were all these ways the sabbatical experiment could have gone. None of that would’ve been a failure because that's why I'm leaving. To find out what's gonna happen.
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