2020 Lockdown – a weird state of mind, where time slowed down while simultaneously speeding up at the same.

I’ve watched the world stop

So still

A pin could drop in the east

and you would hear it in the west

But as the world got quiet and loud

My thoughts became a festival

I’ve never heard them before

They turn sunny days, rainy

and rainy days, sunny

I watched everyone through frosted glass

Seeing the parts that they illuminated

Never seeing the dark side of the moon

Like watching candles burning through the windows of a church

I crushed, badly during the first lockdown. I’ve struggled for a long time with depression (I have never clinically had it diagnosed) or as the internet likes to call it “the big sad”, and I thought I had finally learned to control it but the covid-19 lockdown of 2020 showed me otherwise.

Do you know those scenes of people crying themselves to sleep in movies? That was my life for some nights, except there was no soundtrack to my breakdowns. Just pain and the weird hope for a new day. The only positive side effect, was that the sleep after crying was actually really good and peaceful. Whoever said crying a form of therapy was right.

I will never forget the feeling of being left behind as I watched people do all these wonderful things during the lockdown. The fear of missing out was excessively strong as I saw people start businesses, pursued new hobbies, re-discovered old hobbies and I on the other did nothing. One would ask what were you afraid of missing out on? I don’t know to be honest all knew was I felt like a potato, I knew I could do something but I really did not have the energy to do anything. As my days sort of blurred into each other and the concept of time being a construct begun to take on actual meaning for me, I let go. Slowly at first. I let go of my feelings of being left behind, I made an effort to work through my feelings instead of avoiding them. When I stopped comparing myself to others, I re-discovered things I loved doing but had forgotten about in the midst of the hustle and bustle that is life.

However this created a very different hurdle for me. Should I post the stuff I am doing? That was a constant question for me as I engaged with long forgotten hobbies. Weird to say that even if the pressure was really from within, it felt like people needed to see what I was doing as a sort of validation of the fact that I actually was good at what I was doing. It seems that as I let go of comparison, for a hot minute, I took on the burden of seeking validation. It was two steps forward and five steps backwards with this.

I then realized something, I was doing this for me. These long forgotten hobbies were my means of escape from my brain that goes into overdrive but never seems to overheat. We thank the Lord the brain is like a CPU but the mechanics are different. If I was going to share what I was doing with other people then I needed to shake off the imaginary pressure to impress. I should not be sharing from a place of needing validation for the things I am capable of and whether they were worthy of my time.

The lockdown of 2020 was a chance for me to grow in ways I did not know I needed to. The imposed full stop on how busy life can get was actually a blessing in disguise. In a world where you can feel inadequate for not having any tangible results, I hope you are able to realize that those tangible results come from the intangible work that happens on the inside and the hours of tangible work put in behind the scenes. In the words of Shakespeare “All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women merely players”, so play your part but do not lose your heart. Life happens for you but it also happens to you, how ever you react to both depends on you.