The wisdom of Philippa Perry

I have just seen a tweet from the psychologist Philippa Perry (@philippa_perry) which has blown my tiny mind. She said:

If you hate lockdown [it] probably shows you, you were doing all the right things to make the most of your life pre-COVID. If you love it, you are probably using the time to re-evaluate how you want to live.

 I hate lockdown because I love my life. I am so used to equating feeling bad with being bad that it didn't even occur to me that hating lockdown might be a good sign. (I don't think she is saying that loving lockdown is a bad thing either, just that it's an opportunity to rethink your priorities. Philippa Perry appears to be a very humane and unjudgemental person.)  I miss my friends because I love my friends. I have done a great job of surrounding myself with people I adore. I miss my housemates because I live with awesome people, and the decision not to live alone after my break up was a really smart decision, which I made because I understand my needs very well. I miss going to the theatre and the cinema and gigs and storytelling shows because performance culture beings joy and meaning and connection to my life. I miss browsing in bookshops because I am not a monster. And so on. I guess it's obvious now, but I was too busy thinking I hate lockdown because I am a lousy person with no attention span who needs constant distraction and is incapable of feeling content in her own company.  Even better, all this energy that I no longer need to expend on feeling terrible about myself for hating lockdown I can put into thinking about the things that I am enjoying during lockdown so that I can remember to do them in real life as well. I'm enjoying writing these daily emails. I'm not sure that you will still want them every day once we all have more to do, but it's fun just to write whatever I feel like without thinking that everything has to be part of an important project of significance to my career - writing had got so heavy, and now I get to play with it again. And I'm enjoying going for walks every day and being in nature, which is something I don't get in London and need to remember to keep in my life somehow, even if it won't be on my doorstep any more. I'm enjoying making phone calls, and I hope to remember that I can make phone calls whenever I like - that technology will not (with any luck) be taken away from me, and it's just a nice and cheerful way to pep up my day. And this morning, I went to the shops to pick up a few things and had a lovely chat (from a distance) with the woman in the health food shop and another with the butcher (from a distance) and I smiled and said hello to people that I passed (from a distance) and it made me feel really happy and I can still do that in London even if it means people will think that I am a lunatic (from close by).  And then I thought: who knows what I might achieve if I stopped feeling terrible about myself about things other than lockdown? No, no don't be ridiculous, how would I ever motivate myself to do anything? But what if I motivated myself by enjoying things rather than constant self-flaggelation? What if I noticed that that is, in fact, something I already do, and that as a way to run my life it works just fine? Philippa Perry, what have you done to me?

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