You do you

“Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”
Phrynette Married by Marthe Troly

After one year in lockdown, more and more people are proud of their incredibile achievements, using the time spent at home as an opportunity to do something that was always on their minds: learning a new language, writing a book, making bread.

And obviously, being proud and happy with themselves, they share the good news with their friends, family, social media followers.

This is absolutely understandable and I would probably do the same, hoping to be an inspiration for those who are way more talented than me, but too scared to take that first step towards their dream.

However, from talking to my friends and reading several comments on social media, I found that these big announcements on how productive the lockdown has been are actually having the opposite effect on some people: the general feeling is that they wasted their time.

Binge watching a TV series for hours, playing games with the children, scrolling Twitter all afternoon: most of us are just trying to find our own way to cope with being stuck inside, not trying to make something useful out of the time spent at home. Now, after a year, the general feeling is that we could have done something useful.

But why? Why do we need to spend our time trying to achieve something? Why can’t we just be ourselves and try our best to cope with a pandemic in our own way?

There is nothing wrong with watching the same film 200 times, to stay in bed listening to music, to sleep 12 hours. It is easy to judge ourselves and think what we could have done in this year, but ehy, we are humans and we all react differently.

Be proud of the beautiful human being you are, with flaws and all, but please stop thinking that people spent their time better than you and what you could have done in these 12 months. You did what felt right for you, the world is already messed up and you don’t need further pressure from yourself.

You do you.

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