Everybody’s social media is filled with book recommendations, a movie someone watched and a new recipe someone tried. Everyone has different coping mechanisms and sometimes, it is posting about what you did on social media.
People wants others to know that they are doing fine during the lockdown. That’s understandable. We miss human interaction. But these continuous updates can also make you feel guilty about not being productive.
The word ‘productive’ is defined as yielding good results, benefits, or profits. Thus, your activity is being measured on the scale of yielding beneficial outcomes.
Those outcomes can be in various forms. Productivity is the question on everyone’s minds when somebody asks about what you are doing during the lockdown. This quest for productivity is making many of us believe that we are not doing enough, which is turning into a feeling of not being good enough.
But we are.
Your self worth should not depend on how you’re trying to survive and deal with life during the pandemic. Or on whether you followed through on that goal you initially set excitedly when you thought you’d have all this time – learning languages, recipes and what not.
Many of us are dealing with personal demons right now, the ones we thought we had put to sleep. For many, they are coming back to tell you that they never left. This can make you feel that you never progressed in life since you’re still fighting the same demons.
But to keep fighting is a victory in itself.
Also read: ‘Hashtag Life’: Is Instagram Our Saviour During Lockdown?
Being able to survive the day without giving in to negative thoughts deserves more credit than it is being given right now. Many of us are fighting several battles everyday, ones you cannot post about on your Instagram stories. There are yet others dealing with the lockdown one day at a time. I write this fighting my thoughts, which keep telling me that I didn’t do anything productive today.
There are people across the board who are finding it difficult to find the motivation to do anything. It is important to remember that we are not competing against each other about who gets more accomplished during the lockdown. We are surviving this lockdown together.
Taking care of one’s mental health is getting difficult with each passing day. That, coupled with an uncertain future, is bound to make anyone feel miserable. But tough times require patience. Patience with oneself and patience to learn to be kind to yourself. Patience to allow yourself to believe that it will get better.
Until then, let’s just survive.
Prakruti Mishra is a 22-year-old final year student of M.A. Political Science at Delhi University. She tweets @PrakrutiMishra5
Featured image credit: Marcus Wallis/Unsplash