My First Lesson of 2021: Stop Compartmentalizing Your Life

It's an understatement to say that quarantine has been hard for me. It has made me be less careful than I likely would be if I didn't live alone, but my mental health necessitates putting my physical health at risk, because my mind and heart could not survive if I abstained from seeing friends.

Maybe it's the placebo of the new year and its effect on my optimism, but I am now experiencing a shift. I can accurately describe myself as happy most of the time now. It is likely an aftershock of the movie "Soul" which had a profound effect on me and seemed to be just what I needed to hear.

With this happiness comes my brain's desire to find the reason underneath it. Happiness was the effect; what was the cause? I think part of the effort to just be happy and not cling so closely to big pipe dreams resonated especially in this season of waiting to live wildly until it's safe. We are so confined already, and so we should not confine ourselves further by restricting our lives to only that which serves some far-off dream, as opposed to making small moments in life feel like magic.

The main change I have experienced is that I am compartmentalizing my life less. Instead of separating work friends and Christian friends from college, now both groups know each other. Instead of hiding my personal life from my Christian friends for their own comfort, I am making my real self known and am letting it all hang out. Instead of pigeon-holing myself as a reader and a creator, I am giving myself liberty to forgo a book for the sake of more time with people or another activity that fills a current need. 

Each part of my identity had been stuck in its own canister, not touching the others. I used to believe that this was the best way for me to be able to be all the different things that I am. Dorky and extroverted and pensive and active. But I can feel that by letting them meld together, like so many spices, they enhance one another and allow the others to bubble up and be truly embraced.

Part of this was my admittance that though I'd condemned social media as incredibly shallow and harmful, I eventually saw that though the medium makes that sort of usage easy, I could use it in a healthy, creative way as long as I was mindful about it, and I could make it my friend. 

I began posting tidbits on my Instagram story, things from my life. Nothing profound, but I could sense the change in myself when I showed one day something that I thought was funny and got a reaction from a couple friends, and then later a picture of my baby nephew and I. Even this made me feel more liberated to simply be all that I am without having to explain it. 

I am a single woman who doesn't want kids any time soon but absolutely adores them. I'm someone who isn't often characterized as funny, but I say exactly what's on my mind and I love when it makes people laugh. I may not be close to everyone who follows me, but to finally have given myself permission to live out loud and not hide any part of myself has felt like a new beginning.

It is truly the opposite of profound, as I am behind the curve on embracing social media; so many people already have done what I have just started, but as one who probably thinks too deeply about many choices in life, this is a major personal triumph. Some things that are common sense to some are hard-fought lessons for others.

Compartmentalizing life is a coping mechanism that I have used for a long time because of the feeling of not fitting in anywhere. It lets me feel as though I have a foot in a few different camps, but that is likely an illusion. What it really does is limit me from experiencing full immersion into any one kind of life I could be living. I further alienate myself by holding onto the belief that I must stay in no-man's land and not ever commit to any of these archetypical identitites.

Reading Sylvia Plath in college was monumental for me, but what struck me most was when she lamented that one couldn't live more than one kind of life, couldn't pursue two completely different careers, experience two lifelong loves, live in two wonderful cities. My fight against merging the various facets of my life has been an echo of her sentiments. But my math was incorrect; instead of trying to live multiple kinds of lives, I lived several fractions of one, but nothing was whole.

This speaks to our tendency to label other people under umbrellas of character, and our instinct to extend that same labelling to ourselves as well. Much of the past year I spent living one kind of life for a few days or weeks, then switching when there was a trigger for my attention to go elsewhere. 

But living a fully incorporated life allows characteristics to inform one another, and time spent living this way reinforces my ability to exist with complex sides of myself and strongly believe that it is possible.

When life is hard, coping mechanisms are our mind's way of preserving the self. Passing into 2021 has not been a seamless transition, nor has it brought relief from the hell that was 2020. At least not yet. But I am confident that along with being well-rounded in health, love, and work, to decompartmentalize how I see my life will serve me and add to my overall contentment.