“Do something productive.”
These words were a common refrain of my adolescence. The context changed - maybe I was trying to sleep until noon, watch TV all day, lay around on the couch - but my mother couldn’t stand it. I get it. In these dark days of isolation, I find myself looking at my husband and thinking the same thing, as he is whistling and reading and watching YouTube, all while he awaits the day he is called back into work.
It’s not fair of me, especially in this moment. His value as a person is not defined by his productivity, and neither is mine.
To say it has been difficult for me to focus would be a huge understatement. I’m getting stuff done, but not as quickly as usual. Most signicantly, though, is that my creative thinking capacity - my problem-solving, my late night ideas and my wild imagination - is totally stunted.
There are psychological reactions to stress which cause your brain to reduce its workload. I think “brain fog” pretty accurately describes what I am experiencing these days. I draw comfort in the fact that I’m not alone, I guess. No one wants to be left behind.
Though brain fog is frustrating, experts view it as a defense mechanism, at least when it comes to stress in particular. When we’re stressed, our bodies secrete cortisol and adrenaline, which help us react appropriately to a perceived threat, but that stress can cause a range of cognitive challenges (like slowed concentration, decision-making, and processing).
It doesn’t help, then, to run across this article, about these legendary artists making their masterpieces in the darkest days of their lives and I’m now sitting here comparing myself to the likes of Frida Kahlo and Edvard Munch! My god, I’m never going to survive if I compare myseslf to them. Or, less famously, the first person on this list, Ruth Asawa, made beautiful woven work while imprisoned in America’s Japanese internment camps during WWII.
And here I am, not imprisoned, not crippled, not sick - not producing, and not good enough. At least that’s what the little demons in my head tell me. Quiet, you demons!
Productivity is primarily an economic term; it is used to describe the amount of monetary value a person can produce with their labor; economists analyze productivity (as an innocent, not-at-all related (ha!) example, “The gap between productivity and a worker’s compensation has increased dramatically since 1979”). These masterful artists were producing art, but in their days of isolation they were not productive as far as the economy was concerned,
So why am I sitting here worrying about my productivity in this time? It’s a capitalist, consumerist lie that I must be producing all the time to be valuable. That I must prove my worth and earn the oxygen I breathe, by forcinng my brain into creative processes that come naturally to me but just won’t start right now.
Money is important. I need it. But I can’t be asked to extort money out of every minute of my time.
The masters were producing because they thrived in these conditions. I clearly don’t.
When I am finished with a couple big projects (very exciting but I can’t tell you about them yet), I may revisit an old goal I never had the courage to pursue; a total blackout. A while ago, I read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and one of her suggestions was a week of “no reading” - she suggests you black out from reading anything, listening to the radio, phonecalls, watching television, or consuming any any all media (if written totday, I’m sure she’d include text messages and internet). Make yourself bored. In this time, you only think, produce art, talk to people in person, or go out in the world and enrich yourself somehow.
I hope I can do it. I think I need it.
Here, watch a video of me being productive during some more productive days.