This quarantine has been an exercise in self-motivation. While I’m usually not the best at motivating, social distancing has given me little-to-no choice. Nobody was around to care if I did or didn’t do my work, so I had no other option besides working for my own sake.

It started out slow– in March, my biggest goal was to finish the semester in one piece. I put off dropping my debut EP indefinitely, unsure of when the right time would be to release my music (Remember when we thought the pandemic would last, at most, a couple of months? LOL.) As the days in isolation added up, so did my commitments. I set the new release date for October 7, 2020, so I suddenly needed to make a music video and two album covers. I’d also agreed to direct a feature-length film for a student comedy club called the Hasty Pudding. On top of all that, I had to balance a school workload and my library job. By the middle of the summer, I’d obviously gotten a handle on motivating myself to do things. I’d felt so motivated, in fact, I’d agreed to do more and more projects. Suddenly, the question wasn’t whether or not I could motivate myself to start a project, but whether or not I could motivate myself to stop and breathe.