15 days into Covid-19 lockdown, I constantly find myself either pondering about the many ways to make my time more creatively productive or wandering through the vastness of the internet looking for ideas from the zillion lists of to-dos. This overwhelming tendency to do something, anything to keep me engaged and engage in a productive way, has become a lifestyle thing these days. The lockdown has suddenly poked people in their ‘Get creative’ ‘Get productive’ nose.
I have become an avid user of Instagram in the past 4/5 months. This platform has given me a lot of good opportunities to work on as an artist. I have found many inspiring people from around the world to learn from. On one hand, going through other people’s ‘perfect life profile’ had my anxiety break the roof and on the other, comprehending all the images and information I consumed in a split second of scrolling from one post to another in the last one hour is already giving me a panic attack.
On top of all this, I now go through the dilemma of ‘becoming more creatively productive’. I wake up to unending Instagram posts of people doing this and that at their respective homes under Corona lockdown. Most of them are experimenting with food. Some of them are trying to distract themselves from eating too much and are working out from home. And some are doing both ’cause we know, once the lockdown is over and people are going to come out of their confinements, the body-shaming thing is going to get real for sure. There are others who want to desperately help themselves stay sane in these times of uncertainty and creating art is helping them. I feel them. I have been there even before the lockdown and that’s a story for some other day. There are people who find themselves picking up that book they have always wanted to read, catching up with long lost friends on Zoom, spending quality time with their family and so on. It’s all heartwarming and terrifying at the same time.
What I do now is out of my control. I read, then halfway through I remember about painting and I drop the book and jump towards my art desk. Then halfway through that, I remember about the series someone mentioned in their insta post, I go to NETFLIX and Prime. Then I spent time with my husband, then I run to help my mother-in-law, then I pick up my journal and write one or two things I thought about. And then spend the rest of my day going through Instagram envying about all the things the world did and get depressed for not being able to do anything close to that.
All the posts and stories I see has put me in a spot where I feel both productive and pressured. The pressure often overpowers the productivity and I end up curling in my bed wondering ‘what the fuck am I doing with myself’. Self-doubt gets real.
This might sound alien to many people but I cannot stop thinking about the ‘other-many’ who can relate to this, who wake up every day wondering whether they would be able to catch up with the pace of the rest of the world making the most of their lockdown days. or are they really?
It seems like the lockdown can get extended to some more days than expected. I think it’s high time we stop and breathe and bite our nails about the pandemic than pretending too much like everything is okay. We need to stop putting the pressure of productivity on ourselves. Working from home, cooking delicious food for your family, creating art for self-love is all well and good. But this could turn into an obsession. This could become our ‘new normal’ and that’s dangerous.
- u m a
MUNDANE & THE MARVELOUS 