Create, not consume

Lessons I learned from the pandemic

In the Philippines, the pandemic was a horrible time. We had the longest lockdown in the world, and so people were not allowed out of our homes without a face mask and a face shield. The world seemed to be getting smaller, as the confines of the home became our entire universe, and the stories about COVID-19 filled me with fear. Every day, I would wake up anxious and afraid, thinking of death and disease and Duterte.

There were a few things that helped me during that dark time. It was, on one hand, a hobby that turned into a small business, as well as a professorial chair that required me to attend an international conference and publish an academic paper. Both of them took up so much of my attention, towards creation, that I had to lessen my consumption of social media and the news.

It took all my concentration, for example, to find a good recipe for buko pie, also known as coconut cream pie; to find a source for coconuts, to bake the pies, to market them through Facebook, and to deliver them to my customers. It was so good that I bragged that I made the best coconut pie in the Philippines, and I stand by that boast. The crust was flaky, the custard was freshly made, the coconut tender and delicious. It involved hours and hours of concentration, from the scooping of the coconuts, to the baking of the crusts, to the cooking of the custard. Each pie was a labor of love.

Photo by Brian Kairuz on Unsplash

The same thing can be said by the professorial chair. At the beginning of the pandemic, my Department Chair was rather apologetic when she told me that I received the Corazon Dadufalza-Cosme Cagas Professorial Chair, which meant that I had to present a paper in an international conference, as well as publish an academic paper in a peer-reviewed journal. It was a blessing in disguise. The focus needed to write and present a paper in a conference, as well as attending a literary conference with one of my academic heroes, Dr. Bill Ashcroft, were suitable distractions from the horrors of the pandemic.

It sparked an intellectual fire that I nurtured throughout the pandemic, writing not one, but two academic articles, a short story, and a book chapter, because I was delighted by the fact that writing took so much of my time and distracted me from the darkness of that time. The exacting nature of peer review and revisions suited me just fine, as I approached each revision as an intellectual puzzle, a collaboration between my invisible reviewers and myself, creating something that I hoped was true to me, even as I revised it according to their specifications.

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

The intellectual rigor helped me at the tail end of my Ph.D., when I had to study my comprehensive exam and write my proposal and dissertation. In the end, the acts of creation delivered me from my bouts of depression and despair, and brought me to a small place inside of my head where I could create. The same thing happened with my buko pies and baking, but in the end, I got exhausted by the sheer labor of baking, and promised myself if I ever got into the baking business again, I would hire a baker to help me with my pies.

I don’t know if this all sounds enormously privileged and out of step. I know we have real problems in the world, and I am deeply concerned about them, but as a human being, I cannot keep doom scrolling and screeching, and instead I need to create, instead of consume.

I curate my experiences, which include the music I listen to, the shows that I watch, the books that I read. I don’t watch much television. Social media, however, is my great weakness, and I can go down the rabbit hole of social media, if I didn’t have work or the lure of creation to distract me.

In the end, I think we are animals who love to create. We need to create, to feel whole, to feel happy. At least, I do. This can be found in cooking or gardening or singing. In writing lessons, textbooks, academic articles, poetry, and fiction. I find it much more enriching than consuming media, and I hope that this is something I continue to do in the future, even after I retire.

Create, not consume. It is what saved me from my pandemic depression.