Creation During Catastrophe: What I've Learned During Quarantine by Chris Santoro (@santorodesign1)

I imagine there are plenty of people out there reading this, who can’t even remember this past New Year’s Eve. With how this year has gone, it feels like memories of “normal” life become more distant. While I have moments like that myself, I still remember New Year’s Eve 2019 like it was yesterday.

My girlfriend and I went out for dinner at Les Zygomates in Downtown Boston. Over drinks and dinner, we talked about how 2019 was a year of change for both of us. We’d seen each other go through our fair share of struggles and come out better, stronger than before. We saw growth in each other, and we were proud of our accomplishments. Ultimately, we were extremely optimistic about what 2020 would bring us. What more could we accomplish? What more could we discover about ourselves? We talked about traveling during the summer, finally giving ourselves a long-deserved break from our respective work obligations and a ton of built-up stress along the way. For me, I had goals related to my design studio, Santoro Design. I wanted to launch the new website early in the year, begin to get more of the projects I wanted, and eventually land an office space within a co-working space or other building.

Our hopes were up. 2020 was going to be ours. Then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t. 

By early March, COVID-19 had hit my home of Boston, MA, and it was only the beginning. Around that time, I ended up moving in with my girlfriend down in Providence, RI; escaping the initial cases building up. We watched as businesses we loved began to shut down for the foreseeable future. Restaurants we enjoyed were struggling to keep up, some of them even closed for good. I had to give up the co-working space membership I’d just gotten back in Boston since it was clear I wouldn’t be using it. Our days turned into these amorphous stretches of time. Hours blended in together. Work during the day couldn’t have been more stressful. At that point, I had to not only worry about getting enough work to sustain me, but I also had to be concerned about how I was going to do it all and not lose my mind. I knew that given the state of everything, signing on for unemployment was not going to be an option. The beginning of quarantine was a total and complete nightmare.

Here we are, in the middle of August. As I write this, I acknowledge that I’ve been extremely lucky and privileged to have thrived during this catastrophe. Not only did work never slow down, but it was the best work I’ve done in my entire career; some projects are still on-going. To say that I’m thankful for every single client and connection of mine, who made this reality possible, would be an understatement. I’m also thankful for my girlfriend, my friends, and my family who have supported me during this time. I shudder to think about how I would have fared, or where I’d be right now if it weren’t for any of them. It’s safe to say that I’ve somewhat adapted more to the “new norm,” even though it’s still uncomfortable to wake up to. While I have nothing concrete to attribute to this adaptation, I will say that life in quarantine has been helpful in reinforcing certain lessons that have brought me to this point, and will carry me further.

Allow Space For Unproductive and Negative Emotions

There’s no getting around this: life and work during quarantine have been a fight with the darkest parts of myself: the parts that just wanted to lay in bed, numb and mentally exhausted; the parts that wanted to just procrastinate that task for a little longer; the parts that brought up thoughts of, “What’s the point of any of this?” For those of us able to work from home while constantly feeling the weight of every headline and statistic, it’s been crushing blow after crushing blow to our mental health and our productivity. Contrary to popular belief, no amount of goal-setting or productivity exercises can stifle the feelings of grief, depression, and even anger. There’s no amount of telling our minds to “stop it” or “shut up” when it comes to these feelings of what we’ve all been experiencing: crisis exhaustion. 

The only way we can push through is facing these feelings head-on. We need to give them space to exist and to speak. We need to give ourselves moments to not be okay or unproductive, even meditate on them. When we give them space, we process our feelings and make it easier for ourselves to push forward. In these desperate times, and other times after this, we need to prioritize well-being over productivity, because our well-being will ultimately determine how productive we can be.

Prioritize Yourself Via Your Schedule 

As a creative professional diagnosed with ADD, working from home has been a struggle. Essentially, I was continuously running on fumes. My work got done, my clients were happy, and my studio got paid, but my general well-being was burnt out in ways I’d never felt before. I put myself on the back burner, and I felt it every day.

Since then, I’ve tried to get back to some semblance of my working hours. I have a quiet start to my mornings, work from 9 AM to 5 PM with an hour-long lunch, work out, and then make dinner. I hardly ever take calls in the morning, and I try to keep late nights to a minimum. By doing this, I’ve made efforts to try and reclaim some normalcy. Being a designer requires me to be at my best, so I can make the clearest decisions for the projects I work on, and my clients’ best interests. I know that being self-employed gives me this inherent advantage, but I also believe that these are uncertain times that require us to prioritize ourselves in whichever way possible. At the very least, we should try and reserve one hour of our day to go outside for a walk. Especially for careers in design and tech, there’s nothing more beneficial than separating from our screens and taking a break.

Limit the News Intake

2020 has had no shortage of terrible news. Since the beginning of this year, it feels like the bad news hasn’t stopped once. Especially with our phones, we’ve become a society held hostage to every notification bump, alert, and alarming tweet. This has not only contributed to my own sense of crisis exhaustion but also many of my colleagues and other people. It’s even more difficult to completely disconnect from the news as well because everything that’s been going on has been extremely important; from COVID-19 to racial justice, and our political unrest.

Whether people decide to stop or not stop news intake is up to preference. Personally, I feel like 2020 couldn’t be a more pivotal year for our country, so to stop watching or reading the news is not possible for me. However, I have been making efforts to limit the amount of news I take in during the day. I usually leave it for later in the evening or during the morning before working hours. I’ll get notifications during the day, but unless it’s extremely important I won’t click on them. If I find myself going down a rabbit hole of news overload, I try to snap myself out of it and get back to the task at hand.

We’ve Got a Long Way To Go…

The cold, hard truth is that until we get a vaccine, COVID-19 isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. However, we can at least still try and retain some balance and normalcy to our lives by prioritizing our self-care. At this point, we can’t afford to be anything but realistic about our limitations, our health, and our well-being. As long as we take care of ourselves, we’ll continue to be in better shape to stay productive. The most important thing I’ve tried to remember is that we are all learning and working through this experience together. We can only continue to be patient and caring towards ourselves, and each other.

If you enjoyed this piece, please follow Chris Santoro on Twitter @santorodesign1. 

Rediscovering Self Worth by Brenton Barnes (@brentonsquared)

The beginning of my quarantine was sudden. It started in the middle of March and nearly every day since has felt exactly the same. My day planners, to-do lists, photographs on my phone, and hours logged on Animal Crossing say otherwise, but as a people, we have collectively existed in a state of unknowing. With no idea when this pandemic will end, we’ve reached the point where the past five months feel more like an abridged year with compressed and confusing experiences throughout.

Somewhere in that time, something occurred that felt a long time coming: I became uncertain of my value and self-worth.

* * *

Like so many others, I’ve had the unenviable position of becoming unemployed during this pandemic, but not due to it. I cannot “go back to work” since the company that I worked for doesn’t exist anymore. In the “Before Times,” I would have written it off as a simple set back with mixed emotions. People such as myself had reasons to be cheerful in the past: the world was open and full of possibilities!

Previously, most of us never had trouble finding work and our time spent on unemployment was typically brief. Unfortunately due to the pandemic, with many businesses closed or laying off employees, people are now finding themselves needing to rely on unemployment insurance longer than they expected or wanted to.

My daily routine for the first few months involved sifting through listing after listing on job boards, selecting the right resume, writing the right cover letter, applying for what best suited me, and…generally not receiving a response. If I got lucky, I received a rejection letter, but even that wasn’t common.

I felt a palpable sense of existential dread that was difficult to shake, even when I exercised, went on walks, reconnected with friends and acquaintances, had fun and tried to rediscover my passions. During many nights it nipped at my heels and followed me, waiting, and always finding the best time to strike: like when I tried to fall asleep.

Unable to turn my brain off, I was forced to face a barrage of questions:

“Who are you?”, “What are you doing?”, “Weren’t you supposed to be something else?”

If I dreamt, sometimes I would have vivid dreams about working at my old job: unsatisfied but being offered a wage and bonus to keep life affordable, health benefits, a 401K, and paid time off. A millennial wet dream if there ever was one. When I woke up, the questions would follow and one morning I asked back:

“Who am I? What am I worth? Do I even have any value in myself anymore?”

* * *

The answer to my questions came shortly thereafter: I had fallen into a trap of my own making. My value was being defined by productivity and what I was doing for money. In the past few years, I’ve experienced life events that have changed my lifestyle and added their own anxieties. By allowing those anxieties to take the forefront, I tried to permanently solve my problems by chasing money and felt unable to focus on passions that made me feel fulfilled.

After talking with some fellow graduates of the class of 2010, who are, arguably still feeling the pain of the 2008 recession, I found out that others had experienced a similar realization. They had come to misunderstand who they were and had defined themselves not by their actions, thoughts, or passions, but by their jobs.

This realization was a tough pill to swallow and was just as upsetting as it is enlightening. However, I firmly believe that when something breaks, it opens up the opportunity to replace it with something that does work and will ultimately benefit you.

* * *

My realization immediately triggered a memory. It was of an exercise I had read about on the now irrelevant humor/satire website Cracked.com.

The basic premise was that you were asked to think about what tasks you did after work and write it down as a list. Next, you were asked to think about the person you wanted to be or what you wanted to achieve in your life. Then, you’d review the list of actions to see if they reflected what you claimed you wanted, and then you would quickly realize that your list of activities is what actually defines you.

If I were to use this exercise against myself based on my pre-COVID-19 life, I could list the following as after-work activities:

• Listen to podcasts while sitting in a line of traffic on the highway.

• Spend time with my wife and cats.

• Eat dinner.

• Make a light attempt at being creative (sometimes).

• Do something to entertain myself before going to sleep.

Conversely, the list of what I wanted to be included a writer and an illustrator. Quite the opposite illustration…don’t you think? Predictable puns aside, a creative life is a far-reaching endeavor and I started to think about it long before the pandemic.

When I was younger, I had the same goals and still paid my bills by working unsatisfying jobs. However, unlike in recent life, when I arrived home I was focused on honing a worthwhile skill by practicing and creating new works, making moves, or creating opportunities to further a creative career. Essentially, I was experiencing the joy of creation and deriving value from that.

As such, I re-evaluated my current values against what I wanted them to be and thought about what my younger self would have to say. While I can never go back and be my younger self, I can at the very least look at my past actions, learn from them, and move forward with my current wisdom and skills. For instance, I now have a better concept of time management and a work-smart, not-hard mindset!

I’ve also been actively starting to consider why I choose to do the things that I do. Instead of looking at my decisions as a chance to grow and develop, they’re often transactional and sometimes feel one-sided.

One thing is for sure, whether it’s seeking money from a job or craving “attention” for your efforts (especially on social media), treating any decision like it’s a transaction will make you seem disingenuous and that can take a toll on your psyche. We’ve been warned time and time again that no one should ever do anything “just for the money,” and while there isn’t anything wrong with making money, we should always have a better reason behind our decisions.

On that same note, money isn’t the most valuable currency. Money is helpful and it makes life easier, but it is a fickle variable and is never constant. Time, though finite, is constant and we should always value how we spend our time. Time well spent offers a better self-worth ROI than a salary or hourly wage ever could.

* * *

While it’s good to have come to this realization, I need to recognize that the world is still in a time of extreme upheaval. To try and make a complete one-eighty and become the productive person that I want to be during this time is the equivalent of trying to get my life back on track over the course of a single Sunday. However, I can, at the very least pick and choose my battles, consider the value of my actions and take steps towards valuing myself and having something real to offer.

If I don’t, my alternative is an anti-comedy sketch that I used to show my co-workers to help them feel better: the story of landscape company CEO Eric Haden who had material wealth, but hated his life. He had no significant other, his diet and general health were bad, and he took his anger out on his employees and his office environment. A perfect example of what happens when you don’t value yourself and how that can trap you.

The bottom line is this—that example is no way for anyone to live their life…and certainly not the way I want to live mine.

If you enjoyed this piece, please follow Brenton Barnes on Twitter @brentonsquared.