The exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.
Adam Phillips
Or sometimes, make us see who we are.
Lockdown Life: A Contradiction
Speaking about life in lockdown is, at its core, contradictory, since it is a shared condition that is at the same time intimately personal. As we are physically distanced by masks and the walls of our homes, our days may look completely different from one another. Partially disconnected from the outside world, we are forced to create virtual “worlds” between the walls of our homes, and as a result, grouped into those with children or pets or partners or back yards, and those without. Every home is a parallel universe, each orbiting in its individual time frame and struggling in its own way.
But one thing remains universal: the human need to separate and assign meaning to space. With the industrial revolution, we have divided the land into urban and rural territories, and more recently, into the office and the home, work and life. As COVID forces us to desert public spaces and retreat into the cave of our homes, we have resorted to segregating our apartments, flats, or houses into spaces with different functions. A kitchen table becomes a desk, a bedroom becomes an office, a study becomes a conference room, juxtaposing the domestic with business, our private and public personas mixing awkwardly, our onscreen and offscreen selves contradicting, shirts and ties and lipsticks and how-to-instantly-look-awake makeup mismatching our pajama bottoms.