Is This Where We Find Out Who We Really Are?

As the new lockdown has descended, and we stare ahead into another stretch of having to contract our lives down to the very minimum of existences – seeing very few people, going almost nowhere – I’ve been grappling with how to approach this second wave phase given that all the impetus of the first is spent.

I’ve been thinking about the one thing that has really defined this whole period for me, and it is without a doubt almost one single piece; I have never had so much time to think in my life. I am in a vacuum of thought. And this raises some very definite challenges. First of all, I am an action-orientated person. I like to get up, get out, stay on my feet. Because my head never stops, I need that continual engagement just to bear it all.

I have always buried myself in work, play, people, things to do. Perhaps I’m on the run, perhaps it’s just the hunger to cram as much existence into each day as possible. Yet, I live a lot in my head. I am a dreamer, a ruminator. I actually enjoy it immensely, but there is a fine balance between the folding over of thoughts and a turning in on yourself, and that, from a psychological point of view, for me has been the challenge of the pandemic.

The early part of the first lockdown was perhaps the most acute feeling of that. I was struck by some kind of personal torpor where, beyond the few basic activities, all I could was spend hours sitting, trying to figure it out. And after that period of adjustment, there was a sense of drudgery and still that vacuum. All the healthy mental nutrition was gone, replaced with a 24-hour cycle of unforgivingly bad news, almost like going from the best, nurturing home cooked meals to continual junk food, and so parts of you begin to suffer.

I coped through whatever kind of band-aid methods I could deploy, but this time I realise its different, I am just going to have to find a way to really live with myself.

Perhaps it’s a feature of midlife that made this a reckoning destined to happen. I spent much of my thirties questing, getting that next job, better money, somewhere of my own to live, whilst also feeling the pressure of having a baby before the sands of time ran out - and then a second, so the first wasn’t alone. And then making enough money to pay for it all. Every phase was a goal-orientated mission, perpetually moving through each. Never slowing down. Never stopping.

And I am sure in that way my story is not unusual. A whole generation of women currently reaching midlife have been raised and orientated this way. Our identities have been trussed up with achievements and external validations. Of continually proving ourselves on absolutely every possible level. Many of us haven’t had a real break since the early 90s. Yet underneath this, so many of our values were inherited or thrust upon us, but very few of us had ever had the opportunity to understand ourselves outside these identities, we were so syphoned into early adoption of everything going.

But right now, what’s there to prove, and to whom? For most of us, there is no office to get dressed for, no shade to be thrown under by internal politics, or at least to the same extent. Without an external world at large to show up for, what is there? And so it comes down to this, without all that distraction, just who the fuck are we? And so, within this strange, linear, one-note existence, there is something to be mined, and for women who have spent decades continually outputting in their lives, this is more of a loaded question perhaps than for anyone.

So stripped of all my usual supports, no boyfriend/partner/office/small babies/next life goal on the horizon to divert me, I find myself being forced to go inward. There is nowhere else to go. And this time, the quest is about finding some joy and appreciation in that alone. The extraordinary challenge of being thrown so deeply back on ourselves, to have to stare in the mirror at the same face so often is to love it right back, relentlessly, without turning on it. I am looking at a full rewire, because there is only so much time left to savour yourself, and how delicious would it be if that was the outcome of this dark phase?

Jessie Collins, October 2020.