There were multiple stages that people went through in terms of dealing with the 2020 crazy pandemic lockdown, as well as coping methods that vary from person to person. In my case, it was the biggest change that I had ever encountered in the line of my career, which hasn’t been around for long as I have only been working for about a year now: I had to work from inside the literal corners of my own house.
Like any other naïve fresh-graduate, I thought that working from home was the dream and that I was going to be this productivity master who manages her own time while maintaining a perfect work-life balance due to the amount of freedom that was suddenly handed over to me. It was that way though, for a time at least.
Things were going well until January 2021 arrived. All of a sudden, everything seemed suffocating. Like any other career-oriented person, I started to strive more at work and willed myself to aim higher which is a perfectly valid response to having passed an entire year of growth and learning. However, something was off this time.
The things I did felt forced, and nothing was slowing down anymore to the point that I was close to having a mental breakdown which didn’t make sense because career progression was everything that I wanted. I started to dread the things that seemed normal to me before, and I couldn’t figure out why. That was when I noticed that the reason I was feeling that way was that I wasn’t looking forward to anything else.
As a previously aspiring writer who strived in the field of computer technology due to family reasons, I knew that I had to make sacrifices but I never thought that I would ever feel like this since I still did my best in everything that was given to me regardless of my emotional feelings towards it.
However, I started to notice that something was starting to show itself, even more, these past few weeks and that was because I had forgotten how it was to live on passion and fantasy. Everything started to be about work and career and progression and productivity and being a decent person, that I had forgotten what it was like to just get lost in the perfectly striking lines of a good novel or listen to an aesthetic playlist that gives off a good dose of Victorian-era vibes.
Here’s the truth: you will NEVER run out of work to do. Most of the work is, in all honesty, replaceable but people cannot replace themselves once they have lost everything that they live for because of the demand that it always seems to require. The shaky feeling that I got while typing on my keyboard and drinking my Café Americano during work hours inside my house is the TOTAL opposite of the tranquility that I am experiencing right now as I sip on my coffee and express my thoughts in one of the only ways I know how: through writing.
I am getting back on writing a bunch of somewhat-substantial blogs after being consumed by my academics for so long and let me tell you: it’s one of the best feelings I have ever experienced.
