If you’re like me, you’ve been spending a lot more time at home lately, which is both a good and a bad thing.
It’s bad because we’re missing out on a lot of cool stuff, including events, vacations, hangouts with friends, and even the simple pleasures of being in public spaces like restaurants, coffee shops, or (for me) the town library. Being cooped up inside for too long can also have some pretty nasty effects on our mental health, and that’s not cool either.
On the flip side, more time at home is good because it gives you a lot more of that precious commodity known as Time. Even if you’re working from home and telecommuting keeps you just as busy, you’re still eliminating your actual commuting time, which adds up fast. So that should mean that most of us should be making incredible leaps and bounds in our creative work, right?
In theory that’s definitely true. In practice, though, not so much.
It’s Hard to Be Creative When You’re Not in a Good Mental Place
Part of what makes the COVID-19 crisis so hard is that even if you’re not physically sick you probably still have a lot of worries—worries about your job security, worries about finding a new job if you’ve lost your current one, worries about the economy, worries about your cancelled plans, worries about your loved ones who are doing worse than you, and worries about your creative projects being cancelled, like mine just was.
That’s a lot of worries.
It should come as no surprise, then, that if you’re worried about any or all of these things then you’re going to feel depressed—or at the very least distracted. And that makes it REALLY hard to sit down and work on your own projects, especially ones that require a lot of creative brainpower.
[Side Note: I’m actually having a similar problem right now trying to write this post. The first cases of Coronavirus in my prefecture were confirmed a week ago as of this writing, and I too have gotten permission to stay home from work. The number of cases in Japan is also going up and the prime minister’s declared a state of emergency for Tokyo and other harder-hit areas, so I’ve also had a lot on my mind lately.]
Not being able to sit down and engage with your creative work leads to a special kind of guilt that comes from knowing that you could be spending productive creative work time but that you just can’t seem to do it.
That’s what I’ve been feeling a lot of this week.
Don’t Feel Guilty About Not Living Up to Your Potential in a Crisis
I think a lot about an insight from George Orwell’s book The Road to Wigan Pier, which covers the lives of coal miners in northern England in the 1930s and the awful working conditions and abject poverty they faced. Life was pretty tough for those miners, and Orwell observes that so much of their energy is devoted not only to getting through the workday without a fatal accident, but worrying about where their next meal’s going to come from and whether their finances will hold out. All those worries and struggles, Orwell writes, make it impossible to devote any of their energy to something like focused creative work. Even if the miners had the actual time (which, because of their insane working hours, they definitely didn’t), they lacked the mental space to work on involved creative projects, and thus it was impossible for any art, writing, or music to come out of a hell like that.
So I try not to beat myself up about not making the most of my newfound time, and acknowledge that sometimes I just don’t have the focus or the energy, and that’s a vulnerability I’d like to be honest about.
Accepting that vulnerability, and not trying to force the work, is actually an enormous relief—if I acknowledge that I’m not going to get any creative work done on a particular day, I can cut my losses and go do something else like read or clean or even just go to bed early because I’m tired. I already tend to do this when I’m feeling sick or down, but the big difference with COVID-19 isolation is that I want to admit that it’s not just a one-day problem—it could be a months-long problem.
Even With the Mental Difficulties, I Still Try to Push Forward a Little
One the other hand, I’m still trying to do what creative work I can, and push myself through the difficult times to a degree I feel comfortable doing. Once again, this includes this blog post you’re reading right now, which I almost walked away from not once, but twice before deciding to finish it.
Over the course of my writing this, I’ve decided to push myself a bit to finish the post, take care of a few small things, then take the rest of the evening off. I’d much rather take some time away to put myself in a better mental state so I can salvage the next day and make progress there.
[UPDATE: The day after I drafted this post I decided to take things leisurely—it had been a rough few days, and I wanted to take more time to separate myself from the stress. I stayed in bed finishing a really good Ernest Hebert novel in the morning, then in the afternoon I caught up on email and took care of some work-from-home Day Job stuff that had been bothering me. Now it’s two days later, I’ve just edited this post, laid out a work plan for the rest of the week, and I’m feeling about a million times better about everything. Damn, am I glad I took that break :-)]