By Grace Walters
This is something I would have really liked to have read while I was struggling during self-isolation. Admittedly, it’s quite mentally tough at times. So much of your mental energy is required to keep yourself positive, never mind motivated; and keeping sane is your number one priority in a lockdown, so never guilt yourself into feeling like you should value productivity over health!
The best thing I did was to take the initiative to contact my tutors and tell them that I was struggling. I’d never done this in my first year, having wrongly regarded it as some kind of personal failure, which is just so incorrect. Think about how you’d most like to contact them, also. You can organise a Teams call if you’d prefer to see your tutor’s face, but you can also use the Academic Affairs or Welfare team at your college to help you draft an email. Mine were incredibly understanding, and we worked together to create a plan for approaching the week ahead. Whether I felt up to tackling only a section of the work; extending the deadline; or attending the class with an essay plan instead of a full essay, their solutions will be tailored for you. This really humanises the people teaching you, which some people might feel uncomfortable with, but I found really encouraging.
It’s also difficult to find your daily structure, and you might find yourself sleeping for far longer, simply because the fatigue that comes with self-isolation is often quite overwhelming. Initially, I know a lot of people who have felt demoralised by this: you go into it expecting to feel more productive than ever with all this extra time, but the reality is that you need to be so self-motivated that some days it can feel like an insurmountable task that is so unapproachable that you’d rather abandon it completely, until you emerge from the duvet the next morning. And that’s completely okay! That day will still be a success, in a way that can’t be measured by wordcounts or article pages read. Instead, congratulate yourself on the ways you treat yourself during a really strange time. I took up small crafts like pompom-making, spontaneously experimented with new recipes in the middle of the day, and binge-watched sitcoms on Netflix. That kept me sane, and so I see that as a success. At times I’ve woken up and started to beat myself up about my lack of motivation and ‘achievement’, but the truly important thing we need to remember is to be kind to ourselves. We’re having to spend more time than ever alone with our internal monologues, so we have to make sure that they’re positive ones.