Napping as resistance: a manifesto for the chronically exhausted

I have narcolepsy. This means that my brain, without warning and without my permission, decides it is time to sleep. In a meeting. During a film I was enjoying. Once, memorably, mid-sentence while explaining a financial model to a room full of people who were paying a lot of money for my attention.

For years I treated this as a personal failing. I drank more coffee. I scheduled my naps in secret, in my car, in parking garages, with an alarm set for exactly 18 minutes because I read somewhere that was the optimal duration. I performed wakefulness like it was a job requirement. It was.

Here is what I know now: the body is not a productivity tool. It is a body. It has requirements. Some of those requirements are inconvenient to capitalism, and that is capitalism's problem, not the body's.

I nap now without apology. I schedule my days around my energy, not the other way around. I have stopped pretending that 9am is a reasonable time to expect a human brain to perform complex analysis.

This is not laziness. This is the most radical thing I have ever done.