What Is Rest?

by APASA Co-Executive Director Yusuf Rahman

My dad’s diagnosis with kidney cancer this year has only underscored my difficulty with emotional vulnerability. Though I’m often advised to take care of myself alongside him, the fact is, rest cannot be attained without first being open with ourselves and others. By embracing the challenges of our lives for what they are, we can break away from the norm of silence and overcome our trauma.

Dense clouds cover the USC Village like they have for weeks now—not the weather I signed up for as a SoCal resident.

June is always a strange time of the year for me. June is when things slow down, when everything is routine and teeters on the line between emotional vacancy and peace. June is also hibernation. A fast forward to the next chapter, a longing for the past, a looming dread for the six months to come. It is allegedly when I can finally get the rest I’ve been craving, but I consistently fail to feel it.

In fact, I would say I’m distraught more than anything. Whatever June is supposed to be, this June is not. Mobs are sweeping through Target stores across the country as millions cheer them on. Headlines upon headlines detail another school shooting that people scroll past. Congress apparently just cobbled together some convoluted bill to prevent an economic meltdown that already seems like it’s happening.

There’s a personal aspect to it, too. Friends have graduated, friends have started careers. Friends have moved forward with their lives, and other friends have reconnected with me. They’re living in glamour, solitude, and everything in between. Earth keeps spinning, but I need a respite.

Thankfully, the stars do align every once in a while. On a rare day where the sun decided to relieve LA of June gloom, I went outside in search of an epiphany, an escape from my agitation and quarter-life crisis. Within moments, the epiphany appeared in that there actually wasn’t one. It was enough to be in the USC Village and feel the warmth on my skin. I called someone I haven’t talked to in a while. I watched cars drive by, noticed the green on the trees. 

Maybe this is what rest looks like. Noticing. To observe but not describe. To replace vigilance with vision. To accept the space that our difficulties are demanding of us, whatever those struggles may be. 

No matter the definition, self-care—and an adequate framework for it—has been more relevant than ever for me in light of my dad’s cancer diagnosis this year. He has renal cell carcinoma, which has progressed into a tumor large enough to require the removal of his entire kidney. The surgery was supposed to happen this June, but like all the unevenness I witness these days, it may not happen now. New scans that the doctor ordered revealed spots on his liver that may require a new, more aggressive approach against the cancer. 

It is honestly scary to be twenty-one-years old and forced to confront your father’s mortality, especially a father who you have only just begun to have a stronger relationship with. As it stands, I don’t know what to do. I never know what to do, and I don’t think I will ever know what to do. But to my surprise, the hollowness lifted the more I stopped trying to capture it and instead engaged with world around me that day in the Village.

Which is to say, I directed my attention to the warmth on my skin and to the cracking voice on the phone. To the way I jumped at the cars that sped by, to the smell of the pale leaves. Rest is a fuzzy idea, but I’m beginning to discover what that word should mean beyond doing something fun on a weekend or staying in. It’s immersing ourselves in our environment. It’s openness. It’s vulnerability. 

To put it this way admittedly feels juvenile, but these qualities are nonetheless a foundation we lack. All around me, my peers seem to have suppressed these traits, replacing them with apathy—knowingly or unknowingly—as a defense mechanism. The mentality seems to go as follows: why care when you can detach; why form deep relationships with others when you can save yourself the potential pain; why bother investigating your problems when you have no time to fix them? 

The easiest way to deal with a stressor is to block another one out. On one extreme, my friends focus on careers and school to ignore the problems in their interpersonal relationships. Or, they focus on parties and chase highs to ignore the professional and academic paths that crush them. These dynamics are universally understood but, fatally, they are accepted. Our solution becomes presenting fake lives to others, be it on social media or when we walk into class. We keep the white elephants in our rooms, dangling by their trunks and calling it the college experience.

What if we were more open about our struggles, though, no matter how small we perceive them to be? I have learned that the more I trust others to accept the bitter parts about myself and where I come from, the more I’ve found the rest I’m searching for.

Sadly, doing so is easier said than done. The hardest wound to tend is the one that forms when we are not offered rest where it’s promised, if not for the implication that we must acknowledge the existence of a wound to begin with. I can attest to this because I was diagnosed with PTSD a few months ago as a result of childhood abuse. It’s a loaded sentence for me as well, but it manifests in bite-size chunks. When people call my name, I will flinch so abruptly that it startles them—the number of times someone has said verbatim, “why’d you freak out like that,” is a little amusing. They always feel bad afterwards, and I don’t know how to convince them not to be, and that such a response was simply unavoidable for reasons beyond their control. What my day-to-day reactions really suggest is that I cannot always be vulnerable no matter how much I want to be—the act of admitting is to fight how our bodies are conditioned.

In my case, I was conditioned to remain silent. I was wrong to think, however, that my silence would have to be permanent. In truth, my most important lesson so far has been appreciating the unconditional love I have received in my communities. I seriously treasure how much people value me regardless of how different or similar we are. It fills me with indescribable joy that people turn to me for advice, or that people want to hear my opinions. I am enlivened when I share my writing with friends and they tell me that it resonated, or every time someone tells me that they feel heard—in other words, they themselves find comfort in me. I think that is my strongest suit: attempting to hear people, even when I don’t have answers to anything that matters. Unfortunately, all of this also means that every time it’s June and I watch all my friends return home, isolation strikes me harder than ever as I remain in LA. Who even am I when I am alone? When my dad is ill, and nothing is certain? When I have listened to the same albums over and over again? When home is a place and not a feeling?

I live in a vicious thinking pattern. Only now at twenty-one, though, have I started to accept history and have instead turned my attention towards the people and places I love in the current moment. As director of APASA for the 2023-2024 school year, I want to foster a space of learning and acknowledgement alongside my lovely co-directors. I want our space—which is only a small segment of a larger community—to be somewhere where the tragedies around us can be named, swallowed, and integrated into our bloodstream. That, or I want it to be a sanctuary for those who have only ever known tragedy, an opportunity to finally take a break from life and connect with others. When I reflect on the most healing, most educational moments in my life, they have been the times when I build gates in my walls and encourage others to do the same. We take autonomy of our stories, rather than sealing them away or letting them spill out everywhere.

These are concepts that I’m happy to say are being embraced in our culture more than they ever have been. This is also why I think the saddest part about my dad’s story isn’t any diagnosis, prognosis, or procedure, but the fact that rest is an incompatible concept with him. He got a job as a senior engineer this year after a long period of unemployment, which was also right around when the cancer was discovered. He’s happier because he’s taking care of our family in the way he always wanted to as a father. But he is also restless. Lately, many of our conversations have been about how he can get back to work as fast as possible following the surgery. He’s devising on how to launch back into action after the first couple of weeks, how to arrange remote work, how to answer calls and emails while on time off.

I’m tired just by typing that out, and I can’t help but feel guilty. I’ve been saying so much about rest and how important it is to be vulnerable, yet what about those who do not have that choice? Cancer is already arduous for many families, but when you factor financial difficulty into the mix, it becomes even more demoralizing than it already was. When I express my grief to my dad, he replies by telling me that I should focus on my future, and my time need not be spent taking care of him. What I want to yell, though, is that family is my future. What worth could my work have if it entails removing myself from the communities that matter to me?

We speak in Urdu but talk in a different language. Frustration molds my definition of rest—part of it now means resting on my dad’s behalf, or rather, doing what’s within my capacity to alleviate his circumstances and meet him at his point of view. To my understanding, rest can only come when I know that my loved ones are cared for, that we have people we can return to even when we can’t comprehend them. The painful truth is that my dad comes from a time and culture where hard work isn’t just valued, but hammered in as the only real purpose an individual has. He and all the other immigrants before him had to work twice as hard for half of what others had. So, whether it is laboring to support a family or to fulfill his religious beliefs, my dad will never quite conceptualize rest like I do. Likewise, I will never be able to replicate the ability to exert myself in the way he does, even at the body’s weakest point.

After all, we can only break so many of the chains we were given in our lifetimes. That is why we need family—a kind of family that blood alone does not give way to. Even if we may not be able to break another’s chains, we can at least pick a few up and lighten the load so that they can rest, just as others are doing the same for us. 

My optimism is short-lived, but it gets the job done. No matter what metaphor I use, I am dismayed by recent happenings in my family and the world at large. Yet I have enough clarity to see how that dismay is what’s reminding me to take the present moment for what it is. June, for me, has always been about passing the time until the next chapter, never about breathing it in. I therefore declare that this June, I am resting. 

Which is to say, I’m accepting history. I’m wiping away the shame attached to my life circumstances. Here is a list of some of my truths, condensed and no longer in need of being tucked away from the world—not an exclamation of them, but statements to be registered and held in balance with others. I unfortunately had numerous traumatic incidents in my childhood. My dad has cancer and the future scares the hell out of me. My mom suffers from serious mental illness and is unable to secure herself stability. Then there’s all the stuff I haven’t talked about in this essay: the emotional distance between me and my siblings, the cockroach infested apartments I lived in, the time my neighbor was shot dead, the multiple times my peers shot up heroin. I have caused hurt when I let my anger overcome me and I lashed out at people who called me their best friend. I am not a subtle person. Actually, I am an intense person who invests deeply and to a fault.

With that, I have given my truths. Now, I would like to leave some other facts about me. These days, I’m getting dinners with my dad and coming up with post-operative care plans. I’m laughing with him and all my friends who are in the area this summer. I’m remembering the friends that I miss, the friends who I can’t talk to like I used to. I cook, I clean, I play video games, and sometimes I also do nothing but look pretty. Rest is an action, a framework, a hibernation, a connectedness to the physical world, a concept, a fake thing, a real one. Regardless of its true appearance, I’m accepting the different absences and presences in my life. So, this June, I am indeed resting. I’m committing to the vulnerability and honesty that rest sustains itself on—for my dad, and for myself.