Thank you for patiently waiting. I know that it’s been a while since my last post. But before anything else, I’d just like to say that from wherever you are reading this right now, I sincerely wish that you and your family continue to remain safe. It’s been the only thing I wanted to focus on when Manila and the rest of the world started going on lockdowns.
Having said that, creating self-portraits was the last thing on my mind during the quarantine. But then something about continuing my #CakesWestCoastin series in my social media didn’t feel quite right. If there’s also one thing I realized from the inspirational women I follow in IG, it is that true content creators adapt. Beautiful escapism from Jamie of jamiebeck.co straight from the dreamy South of France and the amazing self-portraits made by Krystal Bick of This Time Tomorrow were some of those that inspired me. And this gave birth to now what I initially called #IsolationCreation but eventually led to #IndaySeries.
For someone who grew up in a household with a help all her life, I sure am familiar with the different types of personalities of our “extended family member”. And it was fun incorporating these quirks in the different self-portrait captions as I post them. But lately, it was only when I was compiling all these images for this post when I realized that maybe Inday is actually all of us during the pandemic. Here’s why:
#1 We learned/ tackled a new household chore. While Inday may be glamourizing laundry in the photo above, it sort of actually represents how all of us have started looking into some household chores that were unfamiliar to us before. Not that I am new to doing laundry. Lol. But some of us started learning how to cook (or even made a business out of it), learned to do the laundry manually because it’s much safer than going to the laundromat or finally tackled that forever procrastinated task of decluttering and organizing. For me, it was actually scrubbing the very rooftop where I took the photo above. The herculean effort to clean it though! 😆 What are some new tasks that you learned during the quarantine?
#2 We Became Interior Designers. Some of us are still lucky that we were able to bring our jobs right into our very homes. As we do so, some might have rearranged stuffs at home in order to find that sweet spot where one can work undisturbed. I had to move things at home and redesigned things sort of. There’s no doubt that laptop tables and chairs are one of those businesses that boomed during the lockdowns. My favorite part though is bringing stuffs up the rooftop to create different interior arrangements in my head as you can see in the beautiful living room picture above.
#3 We Became Plantitos and Plantitas. Yep. Count me in! While we are all grateful for that job that we are bringing to our homes this pandemic, admittedly that means inviting a little stress from the workplace into our household too. In this case, we all turned to our small green friends for some calming and relaxing effect. We also increased our “botanical knowledge” by learning to identify different plants and hopefully included with that is how to properly take care of them as well.
#4 We Appreciated Nature. Not that we weren’t doing it before. But can I just say that the type of news that made me smile during the quarantine was how mother nature got to recover during the lockdowns? Skies were clearer so mountains from afar could be seen (I’ve personally seen it from our rooftop); reduced to nil tourism meant that marine life flourished in some areas of the world and animals roaming about the streets. Undoubtedly, this is one silver lining of the pandemic. But sad to say, not all photos of animals we saw in the news were real though. But still, we get to appreciate sunrises (for some), more colorful sunsets (I observed a lot of pink skies in our area during the quarantine) and when everything is all right soon, we know and will act how to never take for granted mother nature again.
#5 We Played. I couldn’t stress this enough during this pandemic, life is so hard that we cut ourselves all the slack in the world. I’d be lying if I admit that I was working 100% of the times in my usual 9 to 6. When the quarantines were eased and my niece could finally visit, one of the simple joys we found was flying a kite before sundown. That meant going up to roof earlier around 5-ish (an hour earlier before office hour) and just enjoying some time with the family that involved some music playing and dancing. Some of us got hooked into Tiktok dance crazes and while it’s not my cup of tea, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
If you know me, I don’t like making long posts. So I had to cut this short and continue on a second part coming soon. I hope you enjoyed reading and that somehow you were able to relate to your friendly household help Inday’s self-portraits. Keep safe! 🙂