What personal growth narratives are you nurturing through Covid-19? Post pics if possible too!

I know for @strnglft it is bonsai and bread.

For me, it is currently this houseplant bloomer stuff, yoga (which I have mixed feelings about), financial independence, and some career identity growth through Substack & Yak Collective.

I am having some career related depression and am suffering from social isolation as well as internet? socialization burnout.

I feel extremely unrooted, geographically and narratively, from my hometowns in NY/NJ. I feel like my relationships with my professors in college, while intimate at the time, were severed. My efforts are unrewarded.

Generally I feel pretty anhedonic and lost, which my partner mirrored to me last night when I lamented that I did not want to lift weights (DB) anymore. My plant propagation project is the only thing giving me daily joy.

I am trying to recuperate my past in ways possible: doing this virtual yoga TT with people from my past in Yonkers, NY, learning Haskell from @plaidfinch so my college education is not wasted on the forgetful passage of time.

My partner is local to the south; much is culturally familiar to him. But not to me. I don't really know where I am apart from general themes of an indoor domicile or random outdoor destinations algorithmally picked from the AllTrails app, sharing a natural pattern language.

I think it is important to hold onto whatever embers of personal growth possible in this time of unrest. It is hard to recognize growth when much seems like waste or measures derived only for reactive self preservation.

To me, time under covid19 mirrors a passage of time unique to childhood, where you are trapped in some dissociated snow globe, where there is a general awareness of a world beyond but with no impending or clear temporal entry-point.

In a sense, some decisions are easier to make. I think I was able to become financially independent, ironically, in this time because the menial work of my salaried job was not as wasteful as my perception of possibilities in a pandemic-free world.

This was true for me in high school, too, where I deeply resented the confines of adolescent prison, of sleep-jail, but where I was somehow academically high functioning because I did not have other possibilities.

I guess some conservatives like to pattern match this situation to all institutional regulations of tradition, social structure, ritual, as primers to success and minimizers of analysis-paralysis, postmodern ungrounded mental wankery.

But I think a self aware yogic practice of seeing situations in life as free body diagrams whose forces are to be resolved, Christopher Alexanderian "beauty is fit" design problems, can yield remarkably fulfilling/effective results.

Unfortunately most people's capacity for rationality/ability to stomach the truth is shunted.

Anyway, trauma is ubiquitous in life and I don't think that growth is actually a linear process. There is no single state self, as the self is contextually, environmentally, biologically, experientially, embodied.

There are probably unique "attractors" in the self which slightly govern ordered behavior over chaotic, longer periods of time, which then pattern match to personality, values, etc. Maybe these attractors are aesthetic sensitivities.

A good combination of non attachment and grabbing oneself by the bootstraps is perhaps the key to wellbeing in life, imho.

Hard to artfully execute and I feel bad for all the children with the impending trauma of young adulthood yet to experience.