I didn't learn a new language
On not accomplishing lockdown pursuits & realizing that I don't try hard enough.
The introverted side of me has always longed for an excuse to lock myself inside for months on end and not have to go out anywhere, to see anyone. Perhaps then I would write my book, read more books, watch all the films streaming on the Criterion Channel, learn to speak French and Spanish and German and Latin and Ancient Greek fluently. The idea was that I could take myself out of the world to study to become a more cultured person in it. I feel like I have some data to back me up on this: Shirley Jackson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Patricia Highsmith, and Zora Neale Hurston all used isolation to create masterpieces; Dawn O’Porter’s advice on writing a book is to spend a lot of time on your own, get a pet, and eat loads— “writers need big bums to sit on all day”; and Ingmar Bergman, the Danish writer Dorthe Nors told The Atlantic after reading his autobiography The Magic Lantern, “was an extremely disciplined artist” and “he ran his life around it.”
When March 2020 hit and New York City went into lockdown, I (along with many others) felt this was the time I’d been looking for. Because lack of time must be the reason why I haven’t written anything of note, why I still speak shitty French. I had big plans for lockdown. I would write every day, read obsessively. To further expand my mind, I signed up for 5 or 6 courses that Ivy League Universities were offering online for free at the start of the pandemic (I’m still on week 2 of a Yale classical music course, which is the only course I actually started).
I’m not sure where I—or anyone else who was now working from home and had plans to finally write that memoir and tackle those DIY projects—got the idea that I actually had more time in my day by working from and staying at home. I no longer had to commute to work, to make sure I woke up early enough to blow dry my hair and put on makeup. That maybe opened 2 extra hours in the day. Sure, I wasn’t going out anymore (no one was), wasn’t getting drunk, wasn’t wasting my Sundays nursing hangovers. The time I spent having a social life was suddenly unaccounted for. But it never felt like extra time. It wasn’t like finding $5 in the back pocket of a pair of jeans you haven’t worn in a while. They were just hours in a day that I probably spent overworking, as separating Zoom meetings and Slack messages from the time I could have spent learning Russian is difficult when you’re forced to live life within 4 walls.
The time I spent having a social life was suddenly unaccounted for. But it never felt like extra time. It wasn’t like finding $5 in the back pocket of a pair of jeans you haven’t worn in a while.
If I wasn’t working, I was probably sleeping through my alarms, a habit I definitely picked up in lockdown. Or I was mindlessly watching every episode of The Great British Bake-Off over and over again, because it was the only show on Netflix my depressed and anxious brain could handle.
I don’t mean to make it sound like I stopped doing anything in lockdown. Despite feeling physically, mentally, and emotionally drained all the time—and despite the fact that being stuck inside for so long had inflamed my depression and OCD—I was productive. I started a new podcast and found a way to keep my old one going. I did some writing, and even published a piece in a magazine and won a few competitions. I kept a “book” club going over Zoom. I read 60 books in 2020; not an all-time high, but I’m glad I was able to focus long enough to finish Crime & Punishment.
We weren’t in lockdown long before Instagram posts and online articles about all the fun you can have while stuck at home let me know that I wasn’t reaching my full lockdown potential. I wasn’t experimenting with cooking and baking. I wasn’t picking up a new hobby or perfecting one I already had, like podcasting. I remember in one Zoom meeting for work my colleagues and I shared what we were doing each day to make the most of quarantine. I believe we all rolled our eyes at the coworker who said she and her partner picked a new dish to prepare each night, made their own soap, and chose a topic to research throughout the day to discuss at dinner. As this coworker spoke, I was thinking about the PB&J or scrambled eggs I would have for dinner, how I would spend the evening trying to write 500 words, only to get distracted by the family of birds that made a nest in the gutter outside my window. I spent a lot of time watching the mother bird feed her babies, occasionally getting a glimpse of one of the babies pop its head out to see the world. I was hoping I would get to see them learn to fly, but one day they were all gone.
I spent a lot of time watching the mother bird feed her babies, occasionally getting a glimpse of one of the babies pop its head out to see the world. I was hoping I would get to see them learn to fly, but one day they were all gone.
I know I’m not the only one who felt like I was wasting my time in lockdown, who felt like I was barely holding it together. I have friends who couldn’t get through the day without having 2 or more cocktails. I know people who, like me, couldn’t make any routine stick—it was really hard to figure out how to budget all those “extra” hours I had in my day. And a wave of anti-productivity think pieces started to cut through the noise of what sounded like “What I Did with My Lockdown” school reports. Articles explaining why you don’t want to do anything and why that’s OK.
Right now, this review reads like a rant against productivity. I do hate productivity for productivity’s sake, and all these articles (as well as my therapist) have been telling me that it’s a pandemic and I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. But I don’t think that I’m hard enough on myself. If lockdown has shown me anything, it’s that I lack the discipline to do the things I say I want, and everything I’ve said about time in this piece has been another excuse. Excuses—I’ve been making them all my life.
Not going anywhere during lockdown didn’t give me hours upon hours of extra time, but it did give me time. Time that didn’t have to be used doing anything else but exactly what I wanted to do (or that I always say I want to do). I’ve always said that if I could just be locked away somewhere that I would learn a new language, that I would write more, but clearly that’s not the case. I was in lockdown and nothing changed. Except that I’ve had to face something that, deep down, I’ve always known about myself: I don’t have the discipline to do or be who I want to be. That is why I’m hard on myself; because I’ve never been hard on myself.
I was in lockdown and nothing changed. Except that I’ve had to face something that, deep down, I’ve always known about myself: I don’t have the discipline to do or be who I want to be.
I have a history of not completing things, either because I got restless or wasn’t confident enough to deal with the stress. Actually, I’m not sure why I gave up on some things, like the California King snake (aptly named King Tut) I had as a pet growing up. This was during my Steve Irwin phase when I really wanted to work with reptiles— curator of reptiles was the job title my 2nd grade teacher, Mrs. Smith, coined for my future career. She was the one who gave me King Tut, a class pet she needed someone to take care of every summer. After 2 summers of snake sitting, Mrs. Smith let me keep King Tut for good.
There isn’t much you can do with a pet snake other than hold it, clean its cage, and feed it a live mouse every few weeks. The feeding part was thrilling; we’d sometimes invite other kids in the neighborhood over to watch nature unfold in a glass cage. I gradually stopped paying attention to King Tut beyond taking care of his basic needs. Maybe I grew bored with the idea of becoming a curator of reptiles. Because I stopped taking him out of his cage to “play,” he stopped being friendly and bit me. We gave him away.
There were other pursuits with no followthrough: piano, alto saxophone, Invisalign, tennis, journalism, podcasting, cooking. One failed pursuit that haunts me is that I stopped going to a creative writing course I was accepted into my freshman year of high school through a program called Arts High School. Every Thursday, I and other students at John F. Kennedy Memorial High School who were accepted into the program were transported by bus to an old brick school building where we would be honing our chosen crafts with other high school students from around New Jersey.
My creative writing course was all women (girls?), except for the teacher. A group of women writers. Everyone in the class was a superior writer to me. They could create interesting plots, they could write prose that lingered in the air like the reverberation of a church bell when they read their work aloud. Instead of working harder, I stopped going. I didn’t tell anyone—not my parents, not the guidance counselor who encouraged me to apply. I got an incomplete for the course; no credit for trying and failing.
What is it about the pandemic that has lead many of us—particularly Millennials—to reevaluate our lives? It’s all the death, I think. That, and our “normal” lives being put on pause. I’ve known that I haven’t been pursuing the life I really want for a while now, and it’s taken a pandemic to show me that I don’t have time to waste on what isn’t important.
It’s all the death, I think. That, and our “normal” lives being put on pause.
I have a romantic idea of what’s important in life. My dream isn’t that far from the character Cary Grant plays in the little-remembered Grant-Hepburn (Katharine, not Audrey) comedy Holiday (1938): He wants to retire young while he can still move around and has a desire to try new things, then work when he’s old. The one difference is that I don’t want to work at all. I want to pursue everything I’m interested in and live my life on my terms.
Now that the world is open again, I’m pursuing what I always thought I didn’t have time for. I’m learning a language, and I’m learning to play chess. I’m enrolled in a Master’s program for library science. I’m writing every day and working to get paid more often for that writing. I’m considering becoming a cheesemonger. Some day soon I will quit my job and live without a plan; just my pursuits.
I didn’t learn a new language in lockdown, but I learned that I could. If I really want to. If I stop wasting time.