It’s Easter weekend, the sun is beaming down and in just a few hours it’ll be the beginning of week 5 of working from home and self-isolation. It’s been tough and confusing but I also can’t deny the feeling of warm-heartedness emanating from the sense of community that I’ve felt during these past crazy weeks that we’ve all been adjusting to.
These last 14 days have allowed me to experience so many new things as I’ve been settling into a new rhythm. I’ve practiced live yoga with supermodel and my personal idol, Ashley Graham, morning meditation with motivational speaker Jay Shetty and prayers with Hollywood actress Eva Longoria Bastón. I’ve taken part in two live writing workshops with admired poet Rupi Kaur, sweated through a live ab workout with celebrity personal trainer Kira Stokes and tested new recipes from celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, following the airing of a Coronavirus reaction series filmed on a smartphone by his wife.
What a strange time to be alive. But in our modern world with the ability to gain access to thousands of streams of content, across so many different platforms, all of which are available any time we choose, why is the above list so strange to fathom?
For me, whilst the sense of community and coming together, sharing skills and experiences, is wholesome and comforting and uniting and heartwarming, the sense of vulnerability in those individuals offering these things, and the real deep sense of adjusting to a new normality together, is what’s been really comforting to me.
With social media, and particularly the rise of Instastories, we’ve been given an insight like we’ve never had before into the lives of celebrities and influencers and even people that we know in real life but haven’t spoken to for years – it’s made us feel like we know these people. We’ve been sold a new type of content that’s ‘live’, ‘raw’ and ‘thrown together in a few seconds’…because the art of an instastory is that it’s happening in that moment and authentic, right? But in reality, that’s not truly the case, is it?
Although those social media photos and videos are indeed more personable and a more reliable truth, a large majority are still pre-planned and involve teams of people and countless retakes and forward planning and editing before they even reach our social media feeds.
What Covid19 and isolation has given us is a sense of truly coming together, while we’re all in the same coronavirus boat, going through the same experiences, worries, stresses, anxieties and isolation, and that’s what shines through in this new content. Because those teams, creative studios, and personal assistants in every sense, have been taken away, and we are being left with real rawness and authenticity in its purest form.
And I can’t help but feel that this is the real sense of community.
Through those activities that I’ve taken part in, particularly as they’re live, I’ve been able to truly see and tune into the energies of those individuals and realise that they are exactly the same as mine, and most other people’s too. We’re all worried, we’re all isolated, but a lot of us are coming together virtually, to share skills, activities and real talk. And that’s what’s really shining through and true.
So what if this is how we’re meant to be? What if we’re not meant to be separated by class or celebrity-stardom, status, location or age? What if showing our vulnerabilities is what’s truly going to unite us? Because breaking down these barriers has allowed me to see that deep down we are, of course, all the same. Our true essence. We are all trying to get by, with the desire to keep ourselves healthy so that we can spend time with our loved ones.
Whilst this absolutely does not take away from the seriousness and sometimes traumatic times of the current pandemic, what it does do is add a little positivity and sense of togetherness, which makes the situation feel a little lighter and a little easier to deal with as we navigate our way through our new days and new sense of direction.
According to Jess 