It’s been three years since my The Bangsar Boy column ended, and other than the occasional rant on social media, I haven’t really taken to doing much of this kind of writing.
But I am currently self-isolating in response to the Covid-19 pandemic – it’s so weird talking about something the whole world knows about that it doesn’t need explaining – and there are a lot of things going through my mind.
Don’t get me wrong … I am not short of things to do. I have so many deadlines and work owing to friends and colleagues (including an attempt to shift to online learning from Monday next week at the university I teach at) but the truth is, I’ve really been struggling over the past couple of weeks.
This week alone has been all about trying to adapt to working from home. I had to go on to campus on Monday because I had office hours to see my students. After I left uni, we started getting communication from the school and department I teach for that all face-to-face meetings would be cancelled and we should start doing things virtually instead. So, on Tuesday, my friend Rob and I went back in to grab all our things from the office to set up shop at home.
Except that it hasn’t been easy. Work wise, I tend to function best in the late afternoon and evenings. However, I’ve spent the months following my the completion of my PhD trying to build a more practical pattern to accommodate my need to sleep better. The past few years had wrecked my body and I’ve been feeling so much better with the adjustment. This week, all the old habits are returning and my sleep has been badly affected.
So today, I decided to hit the reset button. I woke up, had breakfast and spent the morning and early afternoon deep cleaning my flat. It was way overdue in terms of dustiness, but more importantly, I arranged all the things I brought home and made space to properly work from today on.
This post – and my attempt to start blogging again – is almost a bookmark for this moment, as we navigate the strange days of self-isolation and uncertainties that lie ahead. I actually had this blog set up a long time ago, but I just never did anything with it.
But I have been thinking that I should start writing a little bit to document these abnormal times after my friend Chris – a historian – posted on his Facebook to ask people to start journaling their experiences living in self-isolation or quarantine.
I cannot tell you how fascinating these sorts of documents are to future historians. Almost anything you observe or feel will be interesting in some way to some person in 25, 50, or 100+ years time. They’re so delightfully idiosyncratic, so intimate, so visceral.
Dr. Chris Parkes
Also, seeing how my personal mental health has been taking a beating due to events triggered by this pandemic (I wrote a post on Facebook a few days ago sharing some of the things I’m doing to cope better), writing – the one thing I love to do so much – might serve as therapy too.
I don’t know how regularly I’ll update, and if it’ll just be journaling or include some of the types of social commentary The Bangsar Boy used to write. Like everything else that’s happening in the world currently, it’ll be very fluid and instinctive.
That said, I’m keen on hearing from you so please share some of your feelings too in the comments as we navigate these crazy times together.
I’ve discovered that writing is a way of therapy for me. On a blog or in a journal. Though I much preferred to penned down my thoughts in a journal more than on a blog since two years back. I’ve been asking myself on whether some of the thoughts should be private or public, as well as why do I want to be active on social media, why do I want to post – is it to seek recognition, to tell others I am happy or sad and so on (I’ve since deactivated my main social media accounts. Though I don’t have an answer to my questions, I do find my mind is more peaceful, although at times, I miss getting updates from people I care about).
Just last week, I realised most of the bloggers I used to follow are no longer active, which makes me wonder why do I still blog. Then I realised is because writing is a form of therapy for me and even if there’s no one reading it, it helps me when I write or pen down my thoughts and feelings whether on a piece of paper or on the digital space. I’m delighted to see you are blogging again 🙂
p/s: I do look forward to read more posts from you!
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