How to get your mojo back during lockdown

There was a point during lockdown when getting dressed properly began to feel rebellious. We were working from home and nobody was going anywhere. The commute involved walking from one room to another and most of the people I saw during a working day existed inside little boxes on a screen. It would have been perfectly reasonable to spend the entire thing in my PJs.

Instead, I put on red lipstick.

Remember when working from home sounded like a dream? Coffee in bed, no commute, comfortable clothes and all that extra time we’d apparently acquire by not leaving the house. That fantasy lasted approximately three days. By week two, I was pacing the living room like a caged animal, clutching a lukewarm cuppa and quickly wondering whether I’d ever complain about office banter again.

The days had a real sameness to them. The laptop opened, the kettle went on. Somebody needed something. Another Zoom invitation appeared and lunch happened somewhere around the keyboard and suddenly it was evening, despite the fact that nobody had been anywhere.

I’m somebody who likes movement. The gym, Zumba, the clank of weights and the general business of going somewhere have always helped me feel like myself. Sitting at a laptop for hours while the rest of life contracted around us did not. My world had become very small, very quickly, and that’s why the little things started to matter.

While plenty of people sensibly embraced hoodies, I went in the opposite direction. I wore skirts, I put earrings in, painted my nails Rimmel Double Decker Red and wore MAC lipstick. At one stage I was even putting on magnetic eyelashes for Zoom calls, which feels excessive even by my standards.

I had a polka-dot midi dress from a British boutique that I particularly loved. There was absolutely nowhere to go that needed a polka-dot midi dress, so naturally I wore it around the house. It sounds frivolous because, technically, it was. But frivolous isn’t necessarily pointless.

There was always that moment before a Zoom call started when the laptop screen went black and briefly became a mirror. Sometimes putting on lipstick was less about looking attractive than recognising the woman looking back.

Before lockdown, she went to work, she had meetings and deadlines. She went to the gym and saw friends. She had places to be. During lockdown, those different parts of life collapsed into the same rooms. Work happened at home, parenting happened around work and exercise happened wherever there happened to be enough floor space. The dishwasher seemed to scream attention roughly every seven minutes.

One minute I was trying to sound professional on a call, the next I was dealing with washing, snacks or whatever domestic emergency had materialised just outside camera shot. Getting dressed created a tiny boundary between all of it. The lipstick did too.

There was a strange amount of pressure during lockdown to use the time well. People were exercising, baking sourdough, making banana bread, learning languages and emerging from their homes with entirely new personalities.

I tried plenty of things myself. I stretched in the mornings. There were warrior poses, shoulder rolls and something approximating a downward dog. It wasn’t particularly impressive, just enough movement to remind my body that sitting at a laptop all day wasn’t its natural state, and to forget the anxiety of running out of toilet rolls.

Cyrus provided another form of exercise, with pillow fights, living-room dance-offs and the sort of physical play that frequently turns a mum into climbing equipment. I tried gratitude lists, read, went into the garden and discovered with H that even a strong marriage can be tested by prolonged confinement and disproportionately irritating domestic tasks.

I’ve since become much less interested in the idea that self-care has to be another programme we successfully complete. Even looking after ourselves somehow became something we could fail at. There always seemed to be somebody getting up earlier, exercising harder, meditating more successfully or producing a loaf of bread that suggested they’d quietly retrained as an artisan baker.

Meanwhile, I was still putting on lipstick.

I certainly wasn’t going to become a runner. I’d had Cyrus at 40 and my pelvic floor had its own views on everybody else’s sudden enthusiasm for 5Ks. While other people posted their running statistics, I was happy going into the garden with a mug of coffee.

We watched Mr Bean and Friday Night Dinner until we cried laughing. I read bedtime stories with Cyrus. I wrote down three good things at the end of the day when I remembered. None of it would have made an impressive morning routine on Instagram.

And I wore lipstick. It wasn’t a solution to anxiety, uncertainty or isolation. It just made some days feel a little more manageable.

That’s the bit about self-care I had misunderstood. It didn’t have to be impressive, sometimes it was a cup of coffee in the garden, and it was red lipstick when I wasn’t going anywhere.

I don’t think the lipstick was really about make-up. There are periods in life when the familiar markers of who we are disappear surprisingly quickly. Lockdown was an extreme example, but midlife can do something similar in quieter ways. Bodies change, children grow, work shifts and roles we’ve occupied for years begin to feel less certain.

Sometimes the things that make us feel like ourselves are unexpectedly ordinary. It might be a gym class, earrings, a particular perfume, getting your hair done or ten minutes with a coffee before anybody starts asking you questions. For me, during that period, one of those things was red lipstick.

There’s a tendency to dismiss those things as vanity, particularly for women. We’re allowed to care for ourselves, but preferably in ways that sound virtuous: sleep, hydration, mindfulness and vegetables. Lipstick is harder to defend because it looks like vanity.

Perhaps that’s why I like it.

There was nothing productive about putting it on. I wasn’t improving my cardiovascular health, increasing my fibre intake or becoming more resilient. I wasn’t achieving anything at all.

I no longer think self-care has to improve me. It doesn’t have to make me fitter, calmer, thinner, more productive or better at coping. Sometimes it can just be something I enjoy.

That’s probably become more important to me in midlife. There are enough messages telling women at this age what we ought to be fixing, protecting, reducing, increasing or doing differently. Even self-care can start to sound suspiciously like another job.

I don’t want everything I do for myself to require a measurable outcome.

Lockdown didn’t teach me how to optimise my life. It taught me something much less impressive: when life feels as though it is shrinking, the little things can remind you that you’re still in there.

Occasional stories, experiments, discoveries and questions from Saffron & Cyrus.