10 life lessons from my autoimmune disorder (ITP) that helped me brave the Covid-19 pandemic
Series on Mental Health & Mindfulness
With travelling, shopping, dine outs having come down due to pandemic, we are left with a question: were those really essential on the first hand?
Getting back to basics matters, NOW!
Hello, greetings for the day!
Hope you are staying safe and sound. Sorry for the delayed post. I had to get the Covaxin jab after a Haematologist’s consult, medication, and blood tests to ensure my platelet counts aren’t acting weird. Also, the pain over the arm was not making me any comfortable to flesh out some new content.
At a better place today and reaching out to you with two blog posts back to back. Hope you have secured yourself too with the Covid-19 vaccine.
In the last post when I spoke about ITP teaching me the essential lesson of prioritizing, I told prioritizing can be viewed from two broad lenses- basics and boundaries. In this post, we shall see about the basics.
I’m sure with the pandemic keeping us indoors with lockdown after lockdown we all have stuck to the essentials to a certain extent. With travelling, shopping, dine outs having come down due to pandemic, we are left with a question: were those really essential on the first hand? Especially with the idea of revenge shopping lurking around post lockdowns, it is highly essential to reflect upon the questions that I leave you within this post. But before that, let me tell you something from my experience with ITP that had helped me process and proceed towards minimalism in major aspects of life.
With platelets always in a low, (as much as the lab technician, seeing my report, would write me off for a Covid-19 protocol!) life started taking a different turn. Thankfully, it helped me become more conscious of energy levels in a world that would revolve around targets and achievements. I was able to move out of (not easily though) the rat races that are fairly happening in every aspect of life, from academics to health to even spirituality. So when I realized the need to work on my energy levels, I realized there were quite a lot of energy leaks to seal. Mind you, this doesn’t happen in a day or two but over years. Being aware of the need to look into your life in terms of energy levels is all that matters. Once you give it the attention it needs, identify and take action, everything will fall into place.
We are in a fast-paced generation always looking for quick hacks and forgetting to slow down, rest and simply be. In fact, being overly busy and multitasking is highly rated and seen as being productive while it can prove to be the opposite. If pandemic has led to rising in cases of mental health problems, it’s because we were never taught to slow down, be idle or remain silent. We were used to travelling every weekend, dine out every other day, celebrate in grandeur every possible day with mandatory selfies and pics on social media profiles, take multiples courses, set target after targets, so much so that we were left distanced from what is called as silence and contentment. While occasional celebrations are ok, making celebrations an everyday affair and creating hype makes us look away from the simple pleasures that life has got to offer. We also get into the societal pressure to keep up with the hype, suffering silently behind the scenes.
Trust me, had it not been for ITP, maybe I would have also got into the race. But my low energy levels pulled me down and at first, for a long time or so, I regretted being pulled two steps back every time I take a step forward. But over the days there has been a lot of learning and absolutely no regrets. Thanks to ITP, it helped me get in touch with the basics and the simplest joys that everyone is treasured. Here I leave you with few questions that I had asked myself over the years and decided accordingly that helped getting back to basics proving to be of great help during pandemic too:
- Do we really need variety in food in every meal of the day, incorporating different cuisines, to be actually healthy or even alive?
- Does every social gathering necessarily mean to show up in a new outfit? Won’t hand-me-downs work?
- Does every festivity need a list of must-buys on the home décor front?
- Is it really worth it to splurge on furniture while taking yoga classes on the other hand to do squats and learn to sit on the floor in that poised pose?
- Is it necessary to have a number of vehicles outweighing the number of members in the family, considering the nuclear set-up most of the families are in and a good amount of carpooling options available?
- Do kids need all sort of fancy gadgets, toys or books to be happy?
- Do we really need a bucket list of places to check in to show the world that we are happy?
- Do kids need to be enrolled in multiple classes, so much so that they don’t get to experience their natural creativity springing through durations of boredom?
- Do our clothing needs be as much as having a stash of cloth wear of different varieties say, activewear, loungewear, western wear, formals, ethnic wear, casuals and what not?
- Are we trapped in everything instant-communication, validation or gratification?
I wouldn’t say I’m all perfect and that I have never been trapped into the fast-paced millennial lifestyle. But then I’m in the process of getting back to basics, making conscious sustainable choices. I’m learning to get back to the lifestyle that I was brought up in a typical middle class one where most parts of the living were sustainable per se. And this post is intended to help you pause and reflect. Only you can judge yourself better. More power to you.
Hope this post helps you in making better choices of sticking to the essentials even after lockdowns are lifted. Let the new normal be a place where we breathe basics.
Stay safe, take care.
Blessed be!
This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon and also part of Blogchatter’s CauseAChatter.
