Are You Languishing? By Lucy Wormald (she/her) This lockdown has not really been going that well. I am disorientated and torpid and weary. Adrift in a sea bound and plotted by my own mind. The first two weeks were spent in or on my bed. My dressing gown, my constant companion. My electric blanket, like family to me. I scrolled and refreshed RNZ’s Covid-19 live blog continuously, finding grounding and order in the news cycle. I have watched four seasons of Will & Grace. I have worn my track pants so consistently that they have begun to rapidly pill. I have not read. I have not hand-washed my woollens. I have not made gnocchi. I have not become a Pilates maestro. All my lockdown aspirations have been stream rolled by a monster truck of lethargy. It seems the pandemic has a tendency to erase the body even as it threatens it. I walk, I sleep, I eat. But the experience of these things feels muffled. Like a weak pulse. Or like I am trying to watch a movie through a wall. I am disassociated from my sense of body and my sense of being.
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It feels as though you are muddling through time. Not quite in a mode of crisis, it is also not a state of contentment. You just are. And then the pandemic also dares to demand endless productivity. I am contrite when I do not work or make. I am ashamed to choose indolence. And time is fickle now – unforgiving, moving erratically. I have forgotten how to use time. Or maybe I am using it incorrectly. It appears that when I am given such an expanse of it, I abuse it, neglect it. This internalised capitalism nibbles at my mind, ever-hungry, ever-destructive, souring my aimlessness with guilt. This feeling is not a normal one for me. I certainly have not experienced it in such protraction. Mustering motivation feels mammoth. I feel like I am wearing a heavy coat, shoulder pads like barbells, bearing down, making it difficult to move and to think. I am not burnt out. I have energy. I am not depressed. I have hope. I am joyless and unfocused and listless. I am removed from myself. I am languishing.
Adam Grant, organisational psychologist, says languishing is characterised by the absence of wellbeing. We have grown to understand mental health as a spectrum. At one end lies depression, a valley of ill-being dominated by feelings of despondency and worthlessness. At the other end lies flourishing, wellbeing coloured by a strong sense of meaning and mattering. Grant says languishing is the forgotten middle child of mental health. It is the void between depression and flourishing. A liminal space, it leaches outwards, delta-like, touching both ends of the spectrum, making it difficult to recognise, easy to neglect. It does not exhibit the classical symptoms of mental illness, but it does not possess a picture of mental health either. The term was first coined by a sociologist named Corey Keyes, who was struck that many people who weren’t depressed
