No One Can See Me Cry on Zoom

A myriad of emotions are being experienced during a time in history when norms are under reconstruction and every sensation feels heightened. It’s easy to become exhausted, and even depressed while in isolation, and TQD offers a mental sanctuary celebrating the recognition of self-worth. Recently, Beardsworth spoke to office from Cape Town, where she is currently with her family. She also shared exclusive images shot while in quarantine. 

It’s quite late over there but then again I’ve been losing my sense of time. How was your day and how are you doing?

I was speaking with someone about this – the sense of time thing is so strange. I’ve been pretty good at structuring my days but I feel like the fact that it’s the first of May is so strange because the last six weeks of my life have been far from my normal way of structuring and measuring time. My day’s been good though. I’ve just been working on stuff and on pictures for this interview, which is very exciting.

You mention structuring your day. Do you have a certain routine?

Having a routine is really important for my mental health. It was what I struggled with when we first went into the quarantine phase. For the first two weeks, I was feeling out of sorts. I was like, “What am I doing?” I wake up and I always drink lemon water - I’ve been trying to work out or do some form of yoga or movement every morning, and that definitely has helped me because I’m not really going out. Where I am in Cape Town, they’ve only just made it so that you can go and exercise outside. The last four or five weeks, you haven’t been able to walk or run or anything outside your house. I do that and then I have a list of stuff I want to get done that day, projects I want to work on. Most of them are creative things. 

You’ve traveled the world quite extensively and through those experiences have been able to flex your creative muscles through photography and other outlets – during quarantine has there been one form of expression that you find yourself drawn to the most? 

It’s been quite varied. I’ve been painting a lot. I don’t particularly want to be a painter, I’m not very good at it – it’s not something that I’m gonna put on Instagram and people are gonna be like, “You’re so talented.” But I really enjoy the process - I like having the time at the moment to be able to sit and do something for three hours. It feels like a luxury, so I’ve really been enjoying that and it’s also quite an inner-child connecting kind of thing. Painting and not caring about what it looks like, and getting immersed in the activity is wonderful. 

You wrote the very personal and honest essay No One Can See Me Cry on Zoom. Your sincerity is comforting. What can you share about your experience writing it and what prompted you share it with everyone?

I’ve been a really avid reader since I was a child. I’ve found that the most special thing about reading something, which goes for most art forms but that I find particularly pertains to literature, is when you read something and feel like you’re reading someone else’s experience that resonates with you and your own experience. That might be something that you haven’t even shared with somebody before – like a clicking moment in your head. I’ve always loved writing, I’ve had diaries since I was a child. I just wanted to write something about how I’ve been feeling and I hope it’s something that makes somebody else feel a connection – maybe they feel misunderstood, maybe they feel alone. I want to share things so that other people can see them and then can feel like they’re not alone. 

There’s a particular line in the essay that really hit me. You wrote: “Depression fragments your reality in a way that can be uncontrollable, hypnotic, and sometimes beautiful.”’ During this time, has there been anything about yourself or even the world that you recently discovered that you find beautiful or have never noticed before?

For me it might not be noticing something new, but I’ve definitely had the experience the last few weeks of being able to really reconnect with myself and develop new parts of my relationship with myself that I haven’t had the chance to do before. Obviously, I’m extremely lucky to be in a safe space and not have to worry about a lot of things that many people are having to worry about right now – like having food to eat and having money to support my family right now – I’m not having to worry about those things, which is a blessing. I’ve found it a really valuable time to focus and reflect on the last years of my life and where I am with myself because at the moment we’re all in a space where we’re not being validated by other people around us. I’ve had a lot of personal growth, realizations, and conversations with myself about things which might not be very fun or comfortable. Being alone and having everything stripped away has been a really enriching experience. 

And it’s so important to have an outlet to express these shifts in perception, bringing me to The Quarantine Diary, which you created with your friend Jessica [Lawson]. What can you share about it? 

It’s actually special, me doing this with Jess [Lawson] because she’s the person I’ve been best friends with the longest in my life. My family are English but we moved to Cape Town when I was around 13 and Jess was in the same high school as me. We’ve always had a very open relationship with each other about our mental health – we both had a lot of mental health struggles when we were in high school. We became allies and bonded a lot. Despite living in different countries, we always speak a lot, voice note a lot and Skype. I had the idea for the project the first few weeks I came back to Cape Town because they were closing the borders and my parents wanted me to come back here. I didn’t really want to be by myself in London because I have no extended family there. I got here and was going through it with my mental health. I was so depressed, so anxious, my moods were so erratic. We all have goals we’re working towards and projects we’re working on and all these things have been fallen by the wayside, suddenly our whole world got turned around its head. I wanted to start a platform, something like a diary. At first, I thought “I’m just going to do it for me” and then I wrote the No One Can See Me Cry on Zoom piece. I woke up one morning and I was like, “Fuck. I really think it could be such an amazing thing to create a diary platform for everybody to use” - spoke to Jess about the idea and we developed it together. It was very much born from our love for platforms like Tumblr when we were younger, where you’d be a teenager sitting in your bedroom feeling like you had this connection with other people and a creative outlet where you could put anything you liked. That was where the idea came from and we spent two weeks hashing everything out and building the website. It’s been a really rewarding project so far. It’s so incredible to see people using the platform and we’ve had some really incredible messages from people. 

How has it been to connect with people in a virtual space?

I don’t really like technology that much. I like doing things with my hands, I like seeing people in person. I say I’m quite an analog person generally, so I’ve actually found a new appreciation for the internet during this time. It’s really come into its own in a lot of ways, especially for creative people—there’s been such an incredible way that art has been shared with people. The project is just aimed for anyone that wants to use it. We’ve been getting people from all over the world who’ve written in their submissions, which is incredible. I expected it to be friends, and friends of friends and its people I’ve never met before sending these beautiful submissions from like Mongolia or all over America, just everything. I’ve really enjoyed it, it’s been uplifting. 

People talk about entering a time of new norms. What do you hope some of these norms might be? 

It’s difficult to tell with people because humans are a really interesting species; how we adapt and change and remember things and forget things is really fascinating. From what I can gauge from my own experience and from speaking to a lot of my friends is that I think people are going to live their lives in a more thoughtful and more holistic way—I don’t mean in a way of like using loads of crazy natural medicines and doing yoga every day but I think people have seen the benefits of having a slower lifestyle and I know for me that just incorporating small changes into my day, like being active or doing yoga more often or writing in my diary, these small changes have had a beneficial impact on my general well-being and health. There’s a lot of things we’ve taken for granted that we’re now going to appreciate so much more. I feel like we’re all going to appreciate spending time together. I really hope that this makes us all a lot more present.