Finishing Uni aaand Lockdown

This blog post is possibly a few weeks late, however I'll post it anyway.

As the final weeks before hand-in came rushing towards me, I was very much looking forward to submitting everything and beginning my journey as a professional illustrator and comic artist. I still am. For the first time in my life, my path is mine to choose, with no hoops to jump through, and no-one grading my work.

However, society has come to somewhat of a halt, of late, and the plans that I had laid out for myself cannot continue in the way that I had intended.

I moved back home just before Easter with the naive hope that I would be able to return for, at least, the last two weeks of uni and to still exhibit our final show.

Easter came and went.

And then so did a couple more weeks... aaand a couple more.

It took a while but I realised that I wasn't going to be able to live my last few weeks in Wrexham the way I had wanted. Having BBQs in the summer sun, surrounded by my friends, feeling accomplished that we'd all finished uni together.

But of course, none of that happened, and neither were my plans for after uni - at least in the way that I had wanted.

I was looking forward to travelling down to the library, or a cafe every day to get some work done in a friendly place and possibly make some friends - definitely make some friends. But of course, everyone is deprived of that luxury currently, and may be for quite some time. With all my distractions around me, my routine of the past year quickly fell away. I was told to stop running by the physio, limited space made pilates difficult, having no proper routine meant that I neglected my mindfulness, and my increased time on games made me question the value of my hobbies, it felt like I was losing myself completely.

And then I realised that the circumstances were absolutely extraordinary and there wasn't much point in making myself feel worse than I already did. If I couldn't go for a run then a walk was just as good, the limited space was just an excuse, and I could, in fact, do pilates. Perhaps moving the time in which I do mindfulness would be a way around my loss of morning routine. And although I cannot search my local area for potential face to face friends, I have many current, albeit far away, great friends that I can reach through social media.

So I guess, what I'm trying to say is, that even though times have changed and the current world events have uprooted so many things, it's time to take advantage of the greatest parts of being human: Adaptability and empathy.

We have the ability to contact almost anyone at any time, and now is a very important time to utilise this - it's certainly been crucial to my mental health and probably to a lot of other peoples' too. And empathy is always something that I've admired about humans, our ability to put ourselves in other peoples' shoes and feel what they feel - or at least imagine - the power to be kind even in the face of adversity and change is truly awesome.

I hope that if you're reading this, that you're doing okay.

See you next time,

Mort