Saloni Gupta

Hi! I’m Saloni and if there’s anything the seemingly endless year of 2020 and this pandemic has forced me to learn, it is the true subjectivity of time. The mundane and orderly rhythm of time pre-2020/2021 had days easily chunked out and strong separations drawn between personal, home, and academic life. Sure, I experienced plenty of bad days but there was always school or activities to do that could get my mind off of it. Looking at time now is a little bit different for me. Lines have blurred and it’s no longer as easy to separate between going to school and coming home and having time for oneself making life one big re-enactment of Groundhog Day (which if you haven’t watched, definitely a classic). Anyways, having as much time on our hands as we did early quarantine was both a curse & a blessing; it made me a lot more anxious and I found myself being very consciously aware of how I spent my time during the day. Especially after seeing all of the passion projects and academic advances people around me have used their time to do, I felt more and more guilty when I spent those same twenty-four hours in a way that was neither productive nor enriching to the mind. I had no shiny distractions now to keep me away from coming to terms with the fact that there was something I needed to do to overcome this feeling and brushing it under the rug wasn’t going to suffice anymore. I felt like where others were growing and flourishing, I was retreating further into myself and as far as I could tell, I was still the same person I was a year ago.

It’s been months since this period in my life and I still couldn’t tell you these anxieties completely went away and everything’s perfect now and I have found myself but it has gotten a little easier to diffuse these nervous and intrusive thoughts through healthier avenues. I enjoy planning out my week in advance on a whiteboard with each day having a set of things I want to achieve. It helps me mentally prioritize the things in my life and through writing even seemingly small tasks down, it helps me see that productivity can come on all scales and it’s sort of reassuring. Also, something I recommend is journaling! Although not a new method for mental health and something I’ve been doing on and off for years, picking it up again has made me feel a lot saner these days and helped me enjoy my own company a lot more. It’s also a great personal log of emotional and mental growth, something very important to have because it puts years of good and bad days into perspective and illustrates who you were and who you’ve become (something super interesting to track, for me at least.)

Overall, I wanted to end off with this: during heavy times like these full of political strife, modern-day civil-rights movements, and of course, a seemingly endless pandemic, you aren’t always going to have it in you to use the extra time given to make something extravagant and that’s more than okay. In a society where values of productivity and efficiency are instilled in us from the very beginning, it’s a foreign feeling to not constantly be on the go with the next thing in line but for the sake of your mental health, carving out time to do nothing and being okay with doing nothing some days is necessary to do.