I had a meltdown…and even while I screaming, I was cognisant of the fact that if I broke anything in the room, I was the only one who had to clean it up…and tiny shards might pierce my cat’s paw! Even at the moment that I wanted to have a good cry, the voice of reason wouldn’t leave me! “keeping it together” had become such an unconscious motto that I couldn’t let myself release tension…

Come morning, I decided to let go off the tension with a morning walk, to do the “clearing of the head”…I bumped into a neighbour who asked me “so have you given up theatre? why aren’t you doing anything? the theatres have begun opening right?”….All through this time, I was aware of my breath racing, the panic attack returning…my head pounding…through my mask I managed a muffled response , something to the effect of, “well…I’ll try” or some such thing….

For months I tried, …one line, just one line…come on…everyday the blank screen staring at me, and after a point I even stopped trying. And then things went downhill, the bare minimum — cooking food, doing laundry, cleaning the house became difficult to the extent that I would break down every time I completed a chore, the exhaustion reaching such high proportions that I would sleep for 2 hours straight after …

By now some good sense to remove facebook and instagram from my phone had at least set in…because I seriously didn’t know what was worse — watching people being productive or watching people give everyone the illusion of being productive! Many friends have been telling me its the latter and the truth is far from what I see…

Now, here I am. Haven’t written a play or acted in over a year, with every ounce of energy going into just about getting through the day with some amount of balance…and now I’ve gone the other extreme, I feel nauseous at the thought of writing, and all I can be bothered on a good day is if I need to try a different set of veggies for cooking this week.

With everything stripped from me, my living has really come down to survival…isn’t this what all the philosophical discourses, podcasts are all about, living in the present? I didn’t realise that the pressure to be productive can cause such a burnout from “doing nothing”. And now thanks to winding myself up so much I cant pressurise myself anymore…who knows if I wasn’t so goddamn fixated on finishing writing a play and instead just let it be, I might have actually written some worth a read!

I bet many people are going through this, so here’s the thing, stop. Just stop asking people about what they are doing because in 99 out of 100 cases it will only remind people of what they have been unable to do…

Bitterness over being unproductive has taught me a good lesson…the way we’ve been functioning just cannot hold water anymore…asking people to be productive, move forward , climb higher ( I cringe even as I hear those words) ignores the epic change we have gone through as a result of the pandemic…instead let’s celebrate survival, a small step…and for many of us that step is just letting us be where we are…