From Sunrise to Sunset, She Worked to Reform Herself. Part 1
“He works to reform himself from sunrise to sunset…”— The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead
This body of work takes its title and conceptual starting point from Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead and RaMell Ross’s 2024 film adaptation. The story follows Elwood Curtis, a young African American boy unjustly sentenced to Nickel Academy, a fictionalized version of the Dozier School for Boys in Florida. Elwood is promised that if he follows the rules and works hard, he’ll be released early. But the novel ultimately reveals a brutal truth: no amount of labour or discipline can protect him. His faith in productivity and moral uprightness becomes his undoing.
This idea of reform through relentless work struck a deeply personal chord. For the past two years, I’ve found myself caught in the grip of grind culture, measuring my worth by what I produce. The pressure to be endlessly refining, performing, and proving myself is not simply individual; it is historical, systemic, and inherited.
In Rest Is Resistance, Tricia Hersey writes that grind culture is a product of white supremacy and capitalist systems that condition us to ignore our bodies, needs, and inner worlds. Hersey asserts that rest is not laziness, but a form of resistance. Her work helped me name something I had long sensed: that my exhaustion was not just burnout, but a quiet form of spiritual erasure.
This project explores three intersecting themes: the internalized pressure to overwork; rest as a sacred, liberatory practice; and the aftermath of undiagnosed ADHD and the toll of masking. After receiving my diagnosis, I began to understand how deeply my identity had been shaped by high-functioning survival. My ability to “perform wellness” through constant work had concealed years of spiritual, physical, and emotional depletion.
The imagery of the bride runs throughout this work, inspired by the idea of being betrothed to oneself, a commitment to care, reverence, and tenderness. Within the Christian tradition, the seventh day of creation is marked not by work, but by rest. This sabbath, this stopping, becomes a radical declaration: that we are already good. That value is not earned. That we are worthy not because of what we make or do, but because we exist.
From Sunrise to Sunset, is not just about rest. It is about the violence of a system that tells us we must earn our right to be here and the quiet power of reclaiming that right by doing nothing at all.
Sincere thanks to the wonderful faculty and students of St. John’s College, Olivia Holder, Georgy Kantor and James Agyepong Parsons.
