I am Tired of Being Mad at Myself for Underworking During the Pandemic

Low-Productivity and the Shame-Paralysis Cycle

Everyone has a reason why the pandemic hit them in a particularly bad time. Maybe you were on the brink of a divorce and now that divorce has become expontentially harder for the kids. Maybe you were planning a wedding or hoping to conceive a child and now you have to delay it or do it alone. Maybe you had finally gathered the courage to quit a job you hated or had just taken out a big loan to achieve an old dream, and things came tumbling down.

If you are a typical 20-something year old, chances are, you were finishing up college and were looking forward to jumpstarting your career. Instead you hit a brick wall. Or maybe, like me, you were already a year or two into post-college work life.

And maybe you were already going through a career/identity crisis, realizing your hard work in college did not translate to a job that gave you meaning or satisfaction. That unlike in college, you now did not know what to look forward to. And amidst trying to weigh your options of where to work, where to live, whether to be adventurous or safe, comes a pandemic that takes away your ability to experiment or search for answers.

There was an article a few months ago on the New York Times about the “middle child” of mental health: languishing. It was defined as a state of being that was not as intense as depression but was not exactly the picture of flourishing either. The articles listed symptoms such as loss of motivation and focus, stagnation and feeling empty, while underlining that it was not burnout or the hopelessness of depression. It gave examples of not being able to get out of bed on time in the mornings, or rewatching comfort shows till late at night.

Whatever term you use to describe it, it is the exhaustion of our nerves from being overstimulated with anxiety and fear during the pandemic, resulting in our inability to get excited by or look forward to things that we normally would. And that includes gathering the motivation to figure out what to do with your future, for some of us.

For 20-somethings who have been in school for most of their life and had little to no work experience, re-creating our future plans in a state of isolation, in a world that feels tentative, temporary and volatile means we have to theoretically plan, just like we had always done as students.

“In theory, if X jobs in Y industry stay remote permanently, it could be something I may or am not interested in.”

“If I can try out X industry after the pandemic when jobs in it become more available, depending on if I enjoy it, I will go to grad school further specializing in it.”

“Once my lease is up in this in-the-middle-of-nowhere cheaper place I moved to during the pandemic, I can finally apply to X jobs I am interested in Y metropolitan city.”

And so on.

But then the guilt and shame come flooding.

Was I always this undisciplined, and only the fact that I was getting graded kept me on track all my life as a student?

What if this thing doesn’t end and I just end up regretting all this time I’ve been surviving without thriving?

X is going through the pandemic too, yet she still has all of her shit together at work.

What if I lose all of my sh*t and I am no longer the person I used to be by the end of this pandemic?

It feels like a stab — each bubbly Instagram post telling “boss lady” types to give themselves the time for a warm bath, a hot cocoa, and gentle pat on the back from their busy boss lady schedules or to not feel guilty for enjoying a weekend to themselves. I want to scream, that all some of us do these days is take those warm baths (well, not really, but we technically have the time to — all day long). And that we hate how much time we have at our hands and how un-busy we are, especially in contrast to the boss-lady track our life once seemed to have, but feel too stuck to change anything for the time being. Some of us are appalled at how unstructured our lives have become, jumping from project to project, frantically trying to figure out a path while not having the inner calm to see anything through to the end. Though I am aware that there is a toxic amount of reverence given to work-life and productivity in this country, being left in the complete opposite of it is also toxic. It spoils your character, and the more you stay in that limbo, the more lost you feel than when you first began. It turns into a cycle of shame paralysis for feeling so…lost. Behind. Undisciplined. Frazzled.

It feels like it will never end — the pandemic and the languishing it causes. But I believe that it will. That in a few months time, we will have acclimated or things will have gotten better. I believe that in retrospect, we will see that this curse also brought with it some gifts that we cannot see in the moment. And we need to rock ourselves like a baby through the upcoming months, as our hopes get a little crushed with what seems like a returning wave. Because things really are getting better, but for our hypersensitivity from — well from all of 2020 — which makes us easily agitated and quickly hopeless. We will have motivation again. Our dreams will have life to them again. We will realize that we never “lost” ourselves but were only reacting to circumstances. That we should not be ashamed of where we are.

Related posts:

When I was getting prepared for PSM I & PSPO I certification exams, I found many resources but I couldn’t find a document that includes the most important topics for the exam in one place. Note 2…

There are some veritably essential effects and way need to be taken by the quilting and moving company. You’ll find that doing the same task on your own is hardly possible. This is the reason why…

You can now generate AI art inside the new Charged Particles minting station and put it on-chain immediately on both Ethereum and Polygon. Our dev team has been hard at work over the last few weeks…