In Defence Of The Busy People
You’ll all have seen the memes about the two types of people in lockdown; the people who have taken up three new hobbies, have lost two stone and have grown vegetables…..and the people who have hibernated under a mountain of blankets for the last three months and had their Netflix subscription cancelled for overuse.
You’ll also have seen the tweets about ‘it’s ok not to be productive in lockdown’ or ‘now is not the time to be striving to do more’. The idea that in lockdown, where we’re struggling with new routines, new worries, new emotions or emotions stoked we haven’t felt in a while and that feeling pressure, particularly from social media, to find the motivation to get shit done isn’t healthy in these unprecedented times.
But what about the busy people? What about those of us who ‘busy’ IS our normal? That our motivation levels and our ability to achieve lots in a day is just how we live our lives normally? I’ve felt guilty in the last few weeks for sure about sharing what I am able to get done in a day because the next insta story I’ll see will be a beautiful piece of calligraphy about ignoring exactly what I am sharing if it makes you feel bad. I try and also share the unmotivated times or when I have had a good cry about the situation we’re in but also, I shared my busy days before lockdown too.
Being busy is my state of life, it is how I spend my days and in fact, before lockdown you’d often have found me complaining at just HOW busy I am and how little time I have for myself. Being busy is my normal, so when we’re all striving to find a new normal, it is perhaps understandable why I am continuing my busy life as much as I am able.
I have had a list of things I want to get done but never have the time for since long before my wedding planning started. There’s house renovations to be done, I have a million forms to sign to change my name, I want to order my wedding prints for the album and the walls, I want to get the garden sorted and establish a new workout routine and try new food to cook. Lockdown is for sure allowing me time to do a lot of those, and also actually hampering a lot as I am not able to get materials or tradesmen in and that in itself is frustrating when I want to be busy, that I am forced to stop.
Don’t get me wrong, there are elements I am enjoying and for the first two weeks if it wasn’t for the overarching worry for my job, family and the chronic ache of missing my nieces, I actually enjoyed lockdown like a holiday. But now, four weeks later and with no end in sight I am desperate to get going, to get busy and stay busy - and also paralysed with fear of returning to society too early.
Maybe, like me, keeping busy is a coping mechanism for lots of people. In my biggest meltdown before lockdown I remember saying aloud “But what will I DO with myself? I am scared time will mean everything I haven’t dealt with in the last five years will come back to me” and then I frightened myself with a thought that low, because I never have them…..because I am busy. Keeping busy keeps me sane, gives me purpose, a task to carry out and complete. Keeping busy keeps my mind clear, it helps my mental health and it is the only way I know how to be these last 5 or so years of juggling self employment, employment, childcare, family, marriage, house and life.
I absolutely think if someone is making you feel bad about yourself on social media, myself included, then you should unfollow them, mute them or minimise your exposure to that person. If me sharing what I have achieved that day makes you feel crap for subjectively achieving less then I completely understand. But please remember it is subjective. You might feel shit because I have cleaned my entire house and done the dishes and done two loads of laundry because you feel I have achieved a lot that that…..but believe me when I say that to me, that’s a morning activity and if that’s what I achieved that day I would refer to it as ‘all’ I got done today. My busy and your busy and someone else’s busy is different.
And at the end of this post, it is worth noting that I am writing this after a good two or three weeks of feeling like a human slug and feeling like I have achieved nothing. My motivation dipped to a real low and I hated it, I hated how it made me feel and yet day in day out I couldn’t bring myself out of it until much later in the day.
These are unprecedented times to say the least. We are all dealing with it day by day.