It’s four in the morning and I’m lying wide awake. My thoughts are loud: How the hell am I already 36? How did I find excuses all these years for not doing anything in pursuit of my dreams? My optimistic past self was convinced that at this point in time I’d have some solo albums out, a career as a writer and maybe even have written a book. None of it manifested.
“All those songs I didn’t write come to haunt me at night,” are the words that are ringing in the back of my head. They’re from a song I never finished writing, but they weren’t meant as a prophecy.
It’s clear: I, like many others, am having my own little crisis within the big one.
You can’t escape your self
The beginning of the lockdown seemed kind of exciting for a privileged introvert like me. So much free time! This is gonna be the moment where I can finally give my passion projects the attention they deserve, I thought. Record music. Get to the bottom of my reading list. Become a guitar hero. Write, write, write, write. At last, no social obligations to distract me.
Instead, all month long, I’ve been doing: nothing.
Every second I wasn’t working for my day job I was staring at screens, trying to make sense of things. All my personal projects froze. I will let this illustration by Liz and Mollie speak for me:
Of course, I was trying to cope with fear and uncertainty. But something else dawned on me: While I’m doing nothing for my passion projects these days, I wasn’t doing that much back in the Normal Days™. My personal version of the graph looks like this:
I’m realizing that there must be deeper issues at work, because I have a long history of starting things and then letting them fizzle out.
An uncomfortable truth
Here are some examples: This is the 10th (!) personal blog I have started in the last two decades. Most of them had a few posts, followed by radio silence. I bought a keyboard to learn to play piano – now it’s collecting dust. For the bigger part of the decade I wanted to start writing my own songs and record demos, but I kept putting that off.
Let’s put it this way: In some part of my self concept I’m a prolific creative person who, well, creates a lot, but reality falls a bit short.
It was convenient to say that my obligations of everyday life kept me from following my passions, but I’m realizing they actually didn’t. It was just a convenient excuse.
In the back of my mind, I knew for a long time that this was true. But in the face of the current situation, it becomes impossible to deny. It’s an uncomfortable truth. But it’s out now. Maybe facing it will give me an opportunity to break out of the vicious circle.
Fight or flight?
Me jumping from inertia to total inaction was not totally unpredictable. In times of crisis or uncertainty, people fall back on their tried and tested coping mechanisms.
Most of these mechanisms belong to two main categories: fight or flight. You either go at your problem with full force, trying to get the situation under control, or you do the opposite and try to avoid dealing with it, hoping it will go away.
I clearly belong in the latter group. Others, like the writer Khe Hy, go on the offensive: “When I get panicked about a new situation, I immediately drop frenetically into work mode. It’s the only way I know how to cope with uncertainty,” Khe writes in his newsletter.
For a while, our coping mechanisms totally run the show. They’re the strongest driver of our behaviour, since they’re part of our survival program.
But after a while, after a little sense of normalcy returns, these mechanisms loosen their grip a little bit, giving way to other characteristics that form part of our selves.
Amplified versions of ourselves
People who didn’t care much about being fair to others are doing their best to take advantage the situation. Like the guy who bought up 17’000 bottles of hand sanitizer to sell them for an exorbitant price (he has since donated them, so maybe not all hope is lost). Or scammers who, like never before, try to exploit people’s fears.
On the other hand, hundreds of grassroots volunteer groups have formed in Switzerland over the last weeks to organize shopping and errands for vulnerable people. Not all of these helpers were activists and carers before the pandemic, but the dire times have awakened characteristics that have been slumbering within them.
This seems to be the big picture that is emerging here: During a crisis, people become more pronouced versions of themselves.
I’m curious, dear reader: Have you noticed something similar? Have you become a more pronounced version of you? Do you like it or not?
I personally think you overestimate the average person. Very few of us ever completely achieve our dreams, but either keep trying (and often fail), or learn to be content with how much we have accomplished. That being said, I find it really hard to be alone with myself at times as those questions of self worth are inevitable!
You’re probably right, I overestimate the average person. I guess I prefer to compare myself to a certain group of people that seem to be more successful at doing what they planned to do – which is, when I think about it, not the best idea as it makes me feel worse about myself.
On the other hand I DO want to follow my dreams and do something about it instead of just giving up and somehow accepting that I’ll never amount to much.