Pressing Pause

Confession: I’m a sucker for silver linings. At the start of the COVID-19 lockdown, I first thought: ‘Yay! Work from home, means I can finally focus more time on creating content, catching up with documentation, write for work, write for me, do some journaling, colouring, clean my cupboard and so on.’ The next minute, I realised that while I was excited about getting this time to pause and reflect, I had taken it away by filling it with tasks, plus high expectations of making this time productive. 

As someone who primarily works remotely, this is a fear that I’ve been managing for a while – how do I justify me-time when I work with emotions, thoughts and behaviours? Where’s the line that this processing is for personal work vs. professional growth? Like most of us, I tend to look at all my actions from a capitalist lens – is this self-work going to pay off at work? How can I be a better professional and contribute to my clients?

Now, with a lot of us sharing the privilege of working from home, we have been tempted to turn all our time productive. We might have seen our down-time as slacking off. My silver lining is this: Collectively, we have leaned on each other in ways that we haven’t had to before. Amidst all the fear and frustration, I’m hoping to pause, step back and reflect on what I want and how I feel. I’m allowing myself to feel all my feelings and release them, because amidst this collective loss of control, I feel a spark of hope – to be, instead of become or do. So yes, I intend to feel more and write it down – and maybe some of it will be useful to publish later. But I hope that we’ll keep doing lots of things that mean almost nothing at all in the long run, and feel good about the moments we spend “just being”. 

This article has been written by Nandita Seshadri, Therapist.