Productive

Zara blazer (similar)
Mango dress
Melissinos sandals (similar)
Loewe bag
Zara sunglasses (similar)
Vintage necklace (similar)
Mejuri earrings (similar)
Location: The Manitoba Legislature – Winnipeg, Manitoba

2019 was, in many ways, a heyday. A year of excess like I had imagined growing up, but never expected to actually live. My career was at a peak point. We took six holidays, just because we could. It was wonderful, in many ways, but the pace was dizzying. In 2019, I still measured my life in terms of my output. I lived to be productive, to be constantly doing and creating, always after more – not because I was unsatisfied with what I had, but because I loved it. And if some is good, more must be better.

Now, when someone calls me productive, I pause. The past two years have taught me slow down in a way I never expected possible for someone like me – someone who always identified as an achiever, and wholeheartedly bought into the narrative that doing was more valuable than simply being. I still look back on my old life with fondness. I remember it as happy, but exhausting. Fatigue was never something I allowed to get in my way – I might crash, eventually, but mostly I planned to rest when I was dead. There was too much to do in the meantime, and as a productive person, I had no time to waste if I wanted to get it all done.

I still love a good to-do list. I love ticking things off, and derive a sense of accomplishment from completing projects. But I don’t allocate every minute of my life to them. Sometimes, I just sit.

Just sitting was something my former productive self would never have dreamt of doing. She was, I think missing out.

In some ways, it feels like the life we used to know is beginning again. In the past two weeks, I’ve socialised with other fully vaccinated people on several occasions – once, we were even indoors, a risk I wouldn’t have considered taking even a few months ago. It’s amazing, how quickly we revert to old habits. Even after two years of pandemic life, the way we were before is ingrained in us. We remove masks like we’ve never worn them and forget to put them back on. We stand close to each other, and sometimes accidentally swap drinking glasses.

This is just the beginning. But I wonder if I’ll be able to revert to my old habit of go, go, going when we get to that point. Or if, even if I can build up my stamina again, I’ll want to.

It’s not that I measure my life in a different way now. It’s that I understand that life doesn’t need to be weighed or measured. My life won’t hold more value if I live it one way versus another way. Simple existence, regardless of how productive it is, is enough.

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