Hello.

Working during the pandemic.

My name is Danecia Farmer aka Idaly Maceano, I am a 30-year-old creative who is still trying to figure it out fortunately. Lately, days have been going by slowly as I try to stay grounded and stay as focused as possible on my goals. I think that I have struggled to stay focused mostly because I have so much anxiety about what is going on in the world, so my journey has changed a bit and now I am focusing a lot more on expressing myself thoroughly instead of becoming a complete recluse.

As each day passes by, I am learning to cope with our new norm. Everything around me has changed, the way the world moves, the way we show up to work, and the way we show up in our families and relationships as well. In 2020 at the very beginning, I have no idea what I thought was going to happen, but I definitely did not think that it would be like this. I started out at the beginning of the year performing at a few shows, mingling with friends and visiting my family as often as I could but everything changed so quickly around March of 2020.

Loneliness has crept into my life in a way that I did not expect. I was already a bit of an introvert but this pushed me into my shell a bit further and now I am fighting my way out, forcing myself to do more when my mind is making me feel that I should just stop completely out of fear. I do not believe that we should allow the things that are going on around us to hinder us in a way that stops all of the dreams we had before everything started to change. No matter how cliché this may sound, life is just way too short.

Back in May, I chose to start working from home and I stayed home for about a week and a half before I had to return to the office because my Internet signal was not strong enough to stay home for the type of work that I do. Of course this broke my spirit because I wanted to stay home because that is where I felt safe but at the same time I need my job to feed myself and my family. I am a contact center banker so of course when you are working with customers finances you have to have a clear connection because you are speaking to people consistently over the phone. While I was at home my phone would break up and that would make customers extremely frustrated, which in turn made my workday even more stressful.

I reluctantly returned to the office and sometimes it can be a bit of a struggle mentally because not only am I thinking about the feelings and lives of my customers, I am also thinking about my coworkers and their health. On the bright side, returning to the office took a little bit of stress away from the calls because my customers can hear me clearly and they feel that they are being taken care of. My job has also done the best they can when it comes to social distancing but the way the numbers are rising worries me sometimes but I try to do my best to stay focused and stay on top of my own health.

I started seeing a therapist virtually in August to try and cope with some of the changes and some of the things that I have dealt with in my past that I could not seem to get over alone and it seems to be working. I have learned more about scheduling my time effectively and also learned not to take things so personally.

Working in finance is especially hard because it makes people respond in a way that they usually would not when things are not going the way they planned and their anger and frustration due to the thought of their livelihood being affected is definitely understandable but also extremely draining. I have been coping with that by making sure that I take time away from my calls, meditating, reading, yoga, drinking tea… just doing things that relax me so that I do not bring those feelings home and I am also able to still work on my goals outside of my job without being mentally drained.

Even though this job is not a place that I plan on being forever, I am learning so much about myself and others and I am also learning more about how to show up in my own relationships. I understand that we are all going through it right now and this is hard on all of us and I hope somehow we all come out of this much stronger and more prepared to take on our own lives. Furthermore, this is a part of my journey that I will not take for granted and I hope that I am able to take this and apply everything that I have learned to everything that I do.

Here’s to the beginning of a wonderful journey. :)