My Quarantine Rebirth
I used to pride myself in my efficiency, speed, resilience, and my gift of having “natural Adderal.” I would pop up first thing in the morning and create an enormous to-do list. I knew that all I had to do in order to get through the day was put on some binaural beats, chug my coffee and zone in. I was amazing at ignoring the rest of the world and checking off lists.
This “getting shit done” mentality, however, came at a cost when it came to my own inner peace and most likely the peace of the humans around me. You see, no matter how hard we try to control the people or situations around us, the only thing that we create is a layer of anxiety. For us, and for them. We replace the sturdy ground beneath us with eggshells and we leave very little room for life.
Since this quarantine, a few things have happened. The first is that I have had more time for myself. I decided to write, take walks (786K of them), lay in the park, watch the birds, listen to inspiring podcasts, and to ultimately just be. I don’t know if it’s the Projector in me (any Human Design fans out there?) or simply just the human in me, but these last few weeks have been the nectar I never knew my soul was thirsting for.
A second thing that has happened: in order to assist our Pretty Mental community with extra mental health content, my sister and I increased the frequency of our podcast episodes. Our Pretty Mental platform fuels my creative self-expression so I have LOVED every last minute of it. In spending so much time with her however, we definitely (lovingly) bumped heads. Our listeners have heard us say a few times how I have hummingbird energy and my sister has sloth energy. We joke like this because she truly has always known the value of stillness and flow. During this time, I have been forced to take a cold hard look at my own rigidity and dependency on control.
The third thing that happened to me was the Art of Effortless Living, a Taoist documentary created by Jason Gregory. My sister (we are each other’s greatest teachers), sent it to me and I’ve watched it about 3 or 4 times now. The entire premise of this is learning how live with the flow of the universe versus doing our best to predict and control all outcomes. It is about embracing the more feminine way of life of surrender, trust, flow and being VS the masculine pushing, controlling, directing and doing. The latter option has been one that our society has conditioned into us.
During this time my eyes have been opened even more as to why, as a society, we are suffering from mental dis-ease. I see where the anger, stress, anxiety, impatience, and panic comes from. These are not our natural states of being, these are our reactions to living in a culture that is addicted to control and output. These mental states are the byproduct of living in a very unnatural way, detached from who we really are.
In quarantine, I have had a rebirth. I have buried my old mentality and with that, I shed a few layers of my own anxiety and hunger for control. During this quarantine, I have learned the necessity of surrender over control and stillness over accomplishments. You cannot overlook the scary data about how stressed our society is. I for one, can no longer succumb to how we operate as a society. I only hope that more people start to wake up to the illusion that is robbing us of our lives.
