When Boris Johnson and his pals were sipping wine on the Downing Street terrace, I probably could’ve used some myself. Trying to come to terms with the fact that I was fundamentally unhappy in my life was hard to say the least, but had it not been for lockdown, I never would’ve realised just how unhappy I was.
Going into lockdown made me put the brakes on. For the first time in a long time, I was forced to sit and think about what I wanted and where my life was headed. When all the fun bits of life, like seeing my friends and travelling, had been taken away, all I had left to do was to wake up, work and repeat, unless I took up my mum’s offer to play yet another round of Ticket to Ride that is. It’s through this lack of having anything but my job to do that I realised I no longer felt fulfilled by what I was doing.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like my job or the people that I was working with, which is probably a big part of why it took me so long to figure out the root cause of my discontentment. It was quite the contrary actually. I liked the creativity of my job, communicating with clients and managing social media accounts. Plus, I worked with my best friend, so what’s not to like?
Well, said best friend was about to leave the company to move to a new and exciting job, my brother was talking about applying to jobs abroad and my sister was graduating from university. I was so proud of all three of them but I couldn’t help but feel jealous that they had something I didn’t – direction. It was then that I realised how unhappy I had slowly become, not thinking about my future and not knowing what my next step would be.
Whilst I’m sad to say it took a global pandemic for me to figure out that my own complacency had caused my life to become stagnant, I’m so grateful that I did. I understand that lockdown was a really horrible time for a lot of people but for me, it was a wake-up call and I’m really grateful for it. It’s just a shame that the Prime Minister didn’t use the time wisely too.
