‘I’ve lost freedom, structure and purpose’
Legal YouTube star Eve Cornwell has filmed herself reminiscing about her day-to-day life as a lawyer during the coronavirus lockdown.
In her ‘three-day self-isolation productivity vlog’ (below), Cornwell, a Linklaters trainee, laments:
“I’ve lost the everyday structure in my day-to-day. I get up, I commute, I go to work. I weirdly feel like I’ve lost a lot of purpose. I feel like beforehand I had, like, a set job and a role. Every morning I travelled with the rest of London on the Tube and we all went to work. At work, I had meetings with everyone, and saw my friends. I guess, I’ve lost freedom as well. I’ve lost freedom, structure and purpose.”
She then tries to bring these three aspects back into her life over the course of three days.
“Self-isolation is weird… because it’s not normal. As humans we’re not used to this much limited social contact and also being trapped in a really small space… not able to leave,” the magic circle rookie continues in the vlog which has garnered over 150,000 views a week on from when it was posted. “I’m floating and I can’t seem to hook onto anything and it’s affecting my brain,” she adds.
Viewers then watch the vlogger gain a sense of purpose through setting goals: she creates a LinkedIn page and declutters her work inbox from over 1,200 emails to just nine.
She finds freedom by taking a walk to the park with her housemate (practising social distancing, of course, and staying two meters apart from passers-by) to read in the sun. “It was genuinely some of the least stressed and anxious I’ve felt in such a long time, I think, because I was out and about, I was moving and I was walking,” reflects Cornwell.
She finds structure towards the end of the short vlog when we see her back at work (remotely) from a week’s leave adjusting to her new team and department. Starting the work day at her usual 9:30am, Cornwell fits in two business calls and two to three hours of training, before deciding to pack up and leave London to isolate with her family in the North West.
This month Cornwell documented her journey to becoming an “agile worker” amid continued COVID-19 disruption. She filmed herself getting her home office set up.
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