Apparently today is the 100th day of lockdown. Lockdown has been terrible for so many people in terms of losing jobs, increase in responsibilities, being stuck in abusive situations and what not.
I am privileged enough to not have to have go through any of these. After naming these things, it feels wrong to write the following, but I think it is part of validating my experience, with the acknowledgment that I am one of the privileged ones.
This lockdown could have gone terribly for me. I generally hate staying at home. Even on weekends, I would get myself to go out for a walk, just to step out of the house. When it started, there was so much despondency. What is the point of me doing HRI research when the world is literally dying in a pandemic?
But somehow things changed. The lack of outside contact, the stability and unchanging nature of my presence helped more than it hurt. I wrote 30 days of poetry. 30 days. That's insane. It forced me to accept imperfection. It made me realize that all that matters is that I wrote something, refining can come later. It made me realize that of course, there were going to be some terrible poems when you try to write one everyday, but then some good ones turn up out of nowhere too because of the consistent effort.
I am sure this contributed to my attitude to research as well. Being at home made me accept my bad days. I knew I couldn't go to a coffee shop for a change in scenery. Or go to my lab to be around familiar people. I had to deal with myself. And years of therapy suddenly worked, and I knew that the only way to deal with myself was to accept myself. For once, I just let myself be.
For months and years, I've struggled with the feeling of not being productive enough. Sure, I did accept and stood by the fact that I can't work more than 40 hours, I refuse to work on weekends, and all the other activities I do are as important as research to me. But being only at home, post acceptance of myself, when I actually stopped fighting the feeling, I found myself eventually and naturally going back to research. I found my curiosity showing up, and the will to actually get things done, the excitement that got me to do my PhD in the first place. Yes, there were bad days where I felt really miserable and barely worked. But apparently, I felt worse than my week actually was. Tracking time has been really useful for me to have actual proof of what my contribution was. Clearly, my brain exacerbated how I was not good enough, not productive enough, and I had numbers to prove my brain wrong.
This summer has been terrible in certain ways. The year started looming with sexual harassment only to reach a place where the country was literally burning because black lives were considered insignificant. They finally arose, and so did some of the people who haven't faced such discrimination, to shout out louder even more than before, that Enough is enough. Someone said "They should be lucky we are asking for equality and not revenge." Those chilling words rang through my heart - as my boyfriend said, their request is embarrassingly small. They can ask for the whole world to burn down, and it would be fair. No amount of burning can make up for the amount of discrimination the black population have gone through in the last 400 years. These incidents also brought to the fore how dismally native americans and hispanic/latinx people have been ill-treated over time. I thought my heart could not break any further and yet here I was.
I was ready to burn down the world. I was angry, I am angry, and this anger weirdly feels therapeutic. It reminds me that I am not apathetic. Yes I am a scientist, and especially because of that, it is my job to fight for basic human rights, to fight against the privilege I have been granted over the years, to fight for the discrimination I have gone through the years. I have found myself moving forward despite all the pain. How, I do not know. I had been stuck in the same place, going around in circles for 4 years now, so close to wanting to not live in this world, so aware of it, that I fought against it. That fight seemed hopeless. That fight felt like it did not exist.
But I now realize it did. I was always fighting for myself. I did not give up on me. For the first time, I made all those changes for myself, I accepted my personhood. For the first time, I believed I mattered, my feelings mattered, my WANTS mattered. I didn't just settle for crumbs that helped me survive. I didn't realize it but I wanted to live.
It is not that things are not hard right now. I still struggle with my mental illness. I still struggle to come to terms with it, that it may be a lifelong thing. I worry about what it means about me as a person, what it means about the life I am bound to live. Living with mental illness in your closest family that lasted for almost 2 decades does that to you.
I know I am fighting back in some obvious ways, but in others, it doesn't quite feel like it. But for the first time, I believe that I am. For the first time, I believe that I deserve to live. For the first time, I want more than I am given. It's the 100th day of lockdown and I finally SEE myself. I exist.
I am privileged enough to not have to have go through any of these. After naming these things, it feels wrong to write the following, but I think it is part of validating my experience, with the acknowledgment that I am one of the privileged ones.
This lockdown could have gone terribly for me. I generally hate staying at home. Even on weekends, I would get myself to go out for a walk, just to step out of the house. When it started, there was so much despondency. What is the point of me doing HRI research when the world is literally dying in a pandemic?
But somehow things changed. The lack of outside contact, the stability and unchanging nature of my presence helped more than it hurt. I wrote 30 days of poetry. 30 days. That's insane. It forced me to accept imperfection. It made me realize that all that matters is that I wrote something, refining can come later. It made me realize that of course, there were going to be some terrible poems when you try to write one everyday, but then some good ones turn up out of nowhere too because of the consistent effort.
I am sure this contributed to my attitude to research as well. Being at home made me accept my bad days. I knew I couldn't go to a coffee shop for a change in scenery. Or go to my lab to be around familiar people. I had to deal with myself. And years of therapy suddenly worked, and I knew that the only way to deal with myself was to accept myself. For once, I just let myself be.
For months and years, I've struggled with the feeling of not being productive enough. Sure, I did accept and stood by the fact that I can't work more than 40 hours, I refuse to work on weekends, and all the other activities I do are as important as research to me. But being only at home, post acceptance of myself, when I actually stopped fighting the feeling, I found myself eventually and naturally going back to research. I found my curiosity showing up, and the will to actually get things done, the excitement that got me to do my PhD in the first place. Yes, there were bad days where I felt really miserable and barely worked. But apparently, I felt worse than my week actually was. Tracking time has been really useful for me to have actual proof of what my contribution was. Clearly, my brain exacerbated how I was not good enough, not productive enough, and I had numbers to prove my brain wrong.
This summer has been terrible in certain ways. The year started looming with sexual harassment only to reach a place where the country was literally burning because black lives were considered insignificant. They finally arose, and so did some of the people who haven't faced such discrimination, to shout out louder even more than before, that Enough is enough. Someone said "They should be lucky we are asking for equality and not revenge." Those chilling words rang through my heart - as my boyfriend said, their request is embarrassingly small. They can ask for the whole world to burn down, and it would be fair. No amount of burning can make up for the amount of discrimination the black population have gone through in the last 400 years. These incidents also brought to the fore how dismally native americans and hispanic/latinx people have been ill-treated over time. I thought my heart could not break any further and yet here I was.
I was ready to burn down the world. I was angry, I am angry, and this anger weirdly feels therapeutic. It reminds me that I am not apathetic. Yes I am a scientist, and especially because of that, it is my job to fight for basic human rights, to fight against the privilege I have been granted over the years, to fight for the discrimination I have gone through the years. I have found myself moving forward despite all the pain. How, I do not know. I had been stuck in the same place, going around in circles for 4 years now, so close to wanting to not live in this world, so aware of it, that I fought against it. That fight seemed hopeless. That fight felt like it did not exist.
But I now realize it did. I was always fighting for myself. I did not give up on me. For the first time, I made all those changes for myself, I accepted my personhood. For the first time, I believed I mattered, my feelings mattered, my WANTS mattered. I didn't just settle for crumbs that helped me survive. I didn't realize it but I wanted to live.
It is not that things are not hard right now. I still struggle with my mental illness. I still struggle to come to terms with it, that it may be a lifelong thing. I worry about what it means about me as a person, what it means about the life I am bound to live. Living with mental illness in your closest family that lasted for almost 2 decades does that to you.
I know I am fighting back in some obvious ways, but in others, it doesn't quite feel like it. But for the first time, I believe that I am. For the first time, I believe that I deserve to live. For the first time, I want more than I am given. It's the 100th day of lockdown and I finally SEE myself. I exist.
