This summer I’m living on my own for the first time. At first, I was doing great: living well, being productive… until I hit my first slump. One of the official definitions of the noun slump is, "a sudden severe or prolonged fall in the price, value, or amount of something." After spending an entire day in my room binge-watching YouTube videos of other peoples’ successes, I felt the value of my existence fall substantially. Pause. You might be thinking, “Why are you being so dramatic? People Netflix for weeks at a time and feel no remorse, why should one single day affect you so much?” The reason is as follows:
I was only a few days into living on my own (with no twin sister to keep me in line), and I had already dug myself an empty, bottomless hole of despair. While everyone else was out in the world accomplishing things and experiencing life, I was wallowing in my own self-pity. As an optimist, I have always felt that life is too short to dwell on life’s shortcomings or spend more than a few hours recuperating from a situation or wasting time.
On a similar note, I have never enjoyed being alone. Now this does not mean that I am an extrovert through and through because I do like to spend time by myself. However, I am most comfortable being by myself in a public location where I have the comfort of knowing there are living, breathing people within yelling distance. This may or may not be due to my fear that the world may one day end and I will be completely alone and the last to know. (But we’ll get to that another time.) Living alone has meant spending prolonged periods of time… alone.
This brings me back to the slump that I experienced. Now that I have explained myself, you may start to understand what sort of effect a single day spent entirely on my own, from seeing the sunrise, move across the sky, to disappearing once more, had on me. The sun had done its job, provided for billions of people, then left to take a well-deserved rest, and what had I done all day? Slump.
Your slumps may not be as dramatic as my breakdown after one day of rest, but I want you to encourage everyone to live as productive a life as possible. Of course, I am no position to give advice about procrastination and effectiveness, but I am a girl who has experienced what I like to imagine was a traumatic experience. So I want to propose that productivity does not come from thinking about productivity, using the excuse of inspiration to watch other people be productive, or using your time to plan a productive schedule. I have found that only when you change your mindset and physically start whatever work you are putting off will you actually facilitate the work to be done. Now, this may sound extremely intuitive, but think of what runs through your mind every time you cannot focus. Is it the guilt of wasting time or the nagging feeling that you are doing something you should not be doing? Instead, try telling yourself to move, which is the hardest step that will open many doors.
I wrote this article and exposed myself to inspire you. Everyone falls into bouts of un-productivity, which may lead to self-loathing every now and again, some people more often than others. If you are in one now, I encourage you to do what you can to fight it. The first step is to stand up. Whether you have been lost in the depths of Facebook and that is the reason you happened upon this article or you feel extra crappy about your life standing today I encourage you to sit back, take a deep breath, and stand up. In the future, keep that phrase in your mind anytime your willpower falters: “Stand up.”
