Finally, ‘The Big Tent’
It’s been over a year since COVID-19 decided to visit us all. While we’re nowhere close to calling the present ‘post-pandemic’, I’d still like to ask, ‘how would you compare your pre-pandemic and post-pandemic selves?’ How has your life been since March 2020?
A roller-coaster ride, I suppose? Mine certainly was. When the pandemic struck, I was blissfully unaware. ‘Pandemic’, until then, was just another barely used word in my vocabulary. Even though I’d been reading tweets on this virus from China back in Jan 2020, getting directly affected by it seemed like a far-fetched idea. Just how wrong was I?!
Mid-March 2020, my workplace was shut. “What do you mean we don’t have to work from the office anymore?”, “WFH, forever?!” Paradise, I thought.
I was holed up in my apartment with S, my then-boyfriend-now-husband, and A & M, my best friends. We stocked up on food, participated in Modi’s Janata curfew, yes, the bells and the lights and the whole shebang. During the curfew, S & I walked out into our street for a brief moment and breathed in the silence, the inaction. I was starting to love this life. I barely had 4–5 hours of work every day and spent the rest of the time doing things I loved. I read A LOT. The time then reminds me of those long, carefree summer vacations back in school, when I would gobble up books one after another. I was also bingeing on movies and series. The lockdown also had me experimenting with cooking for the first time. I don’t know why, maybe because restaurants were shut and I was craving good food, maybe I was just bored and wanted to try something new, maybe I liked the quick results and got dopamine hits.
S too spent his alone time reading and drawing. He binged on comics, finished every possible book of One Punch Man. M, the workaholic, was drowned in work while A seemed to balance work and fun.
Within a month of WFH, the pandemic had also pushed me into this constant state of self-reflection and self-discovery. I was playing around with meditation and ended up questioning my existence, my work, and my worth. Yeah, I was overthinking it all.
But the overthinking also had a bright side. It left me with a few takeaways:
· Goodbye to Sales: I knew I had to move away from Sales. I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed as a sales guy. That meant, it was time to move on from my current job. While I completely enjoyed building & scaling Corporate Sales at STEP | The Hindu Group and it gave me a balance I required back then, I wasn’t feeling fulfilled. I wasn’t being creatively tickled. I went on a job search spree and have closed something I will get into later.
· Stoking myself creatively: When I started The Soul Window with M, it also served as a medium for me to express myself creatively. And I loved and missed that part of me. To feel like me again, I knew I had to write, travel and immerse myself in books and movies.
· Need for a community: I am an ambivert. While I love my alone time and could be happy on my own for hours, I equally love people and shades that are not my own. I realized that part of the emptiness I feel is also from the lack of a community.
· Need for honest talk: Wouldn’t life be more liveable if we could just speak our thoughts instead of curating them through those multiple filters? Could we have skipped the mental health epidemic if we could speak our minds and knew we wouldn’t be judged?
Putting them all together, I am going to attempt to create what I’d like to call ‘The Big Tent’, a space where nothing is offensive, and expression is unfiltered. This is also my selfish attempt to draw people who’d vibe with me.
Wish me luck!
P.S. This sounds like everything under the sun, and it probably is. But the truth is, I don’t have clarity yet. So I am ‘trusting the process’, I will proceed to ‘build in public’, sift with time and hopefully discover my niche.
