Responsibility, Resilience, Acceptance

At first glance, I appear to have wasted 2020 //

Photography by Nalisha Kumarasinghe

The year was off to a good start. Everything was running smoothly as I was planning to wrap up my last semester of university life. Then the lockdowns due to COVID-19 came and threw my life into disarray. I knew I wasn’t the only one, but that did little to comfort me. 

I’m not proud to admit that I don’t respond well to such adverse events default response was always self-blame, filling myself with thoughts of being lousy and feeling guilty. And the next thing I know, I would be placing myself in the infinite scroll on my social media platforms to numb away those emotions. I was already addicted to social media before the lockdowns but fuelled by the need to avoid these emotions, the scrolling got worse. I would often neglect my assignments in favour of being on social media. It was easy to just blame it on the stress and ask for the extension. It’s never wise to stay up into the wee hours of the morning to rush for a deadline because you decided to be on Facebook for four hours straight the day before. Moreover, people tend to only post the best parts of their lives, adding on to the guilt and sense of lousiness I have for myself, forming a vicious cycle. 

Resilience, to some, is about grit: biting the bullet and press on when things are not going well.

This would include browsing social media or other unhealthy means to distract myself. While that is true to some extent, this advice appears to only help me in the short run. Initially, I would succeed in trying to numb my negative emotions. However, I would “give up” quickly because I caved into my negative thoughts and emotions. And before I knew it, the vicious cycle was back. 

But in 2020 I realised that suppressing my emotions didn’t bring me anything. I realised that suppressing or numbing emotions sometimes would lead them to return stronger. Perhaps I should be grateful that the world slowed down, and I had more time for therapy and reading self-help books. Through them, I had learnt to accept my negative emotions. My counsellor told me that our minds unfortunately, tend to produce more negative thoughts than positive thoughts. It was to help us survive when we were cavemen, when threats and food shortages were common Sadly, it was a trait that does little to help deal with modern stressful situations. 

So how does acceptance build resilience?

Photography by Nalisha Kumarasinghe

To me, the first and most important step is that when things don’t go your way, you would need to accept that it’s your responsibility for what happens next. Accept that your mind will produce negative emotions, but it is your responsibility to learn not to be bogged down by them. See emotions as your body’s desire to tell you that there is a need it wants you to fulfil, not as a punishment for something that went wrong but take it as your responsibility to find out and address that need. 

Back to my personal example of being on social media. I mentioned earlier in this piece that I tend to spend hours on social media, and would often be angry at myself for doing so. This anger would then, be translated into guilt and to numb this emotion, I would go back on social media again.

Imposing “hard” measures to prevent myself from going onto social media is helpful, but it does not cure the root of the problem. 

I sat back and ask myself: what do I get from doing on social media? I figured that it was a sense of comfort that I have an excuse for temporarily not doing what I don’t like? An avenue of avoidance? That I get instantly rewarded for “removal of the unpleasant task?” (If this is so, how should I get myself to start the said unpleasant task?)

WORDS: YANCHAO HUANG
PHOTOGRAPHY: NALISHA KUMARASINGHE