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How I Benefited From Covid

2021 Hubert Butler Essay Prize Runner Up

By Conor MatthewsPublished 2 years ago 15 min read
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How I Benefited From Covid
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

[The following was submitted for the 2021 Hubert Butler Essay Prize, where it was awarded a runner-up prize. The context is the essay was to be titled “ “During the plague I came into my own” (Anthony Hecht). Who or what benefited from Covid-19?” As such, the essay begins in reference to that title.]

I did.

I don’t mean to sound melodramatic, but living through Covid I’ve learned that the time to be tame has limits, one being the truth. I am tired of pretending things were perfect, that people’s “opinions” are worth serious consideration, that my life hasn’t improved in many regards because of Covid. If it wasn’t for Covid, I’d be dead.

February 2020. That was the closest I came to killing myself. I was thirty, coming up to my fourth anniversary with my wonderful girlfriend, my third year living with her, and my eighth year of unemployment. Eight years. I had spent longer unemployed than I had in college. Anyone who says Ireland isn’t classist is someone I’d question whether they are unintelligent, amoral, or possibly both. Ireland has a strange suspicion about its fellow countrymen, as though someone is getting extra helpings. The only thing more horrific than this thought is that the people who are getting more are poor!

I have no experience at being homeless nor an immigrant (at least not in my home country), but my sympathies for them come from how I’ve seen the unemployed treated. I’ve seen ineffective schemes with buzzwords like “activation” and “upskilling”, but nothing behind them other than men and women slotted in place like pawns killed off for a cheap check. I’ve seen employers use these schemes to hire the overqualified as unpaid interns. I’ve seen my own government shunt their responsibilities, sending tax-payer money out of the country and into the hands of companies who used us on welfare, us who wished for help and guidance, as contract jobs and bonuses. I consider myself lucky, only being berated and threatened slightly.

Here’s what people don’t understand about being unemployed. If I were a teacher, I’d be a teacher between certain hours and days; eight to three, five days a week. If I were a GP with their own practice, I would only be open between nine and five. When you have a job, you’re only your job for a few hours a day, a few days a week. When you’re unemployed, you’re always unemployed. You don’t get a reprieve at ten at night, when someone’s asking you if you’ve applied for this or that. You don’t get weekends off, especially when someone feels like it’s okay to joke every day must be a weekend for you. Ireland has a terrible complex where they feel like everyone should have a close eye kept on them. This results in an all consuming feeling of constantly gaslighting, like you’re doing something wrong just existing. You deserve every condescending comment. It’s your fault you’re not good enough. You deserve to be questioned. It’s your fault we don’t value your life. When you’re constantly told that your value comes from how others use you, what other conclusion are you supposed to come to other than you should kill yourself. Contrary to belief, suicide is a democratic decision.

In terms of how close I came to killing myself, I had already decided upon it. I was no longer weighing my options; I was going to kill myself. I had to work out details, mainly method and location. I most likely would have resorted to hanging myself. It’s not ideal, but I was limited for options. Location proved most difficult. I needed somewhere secluded enough where people I cared about wouldn’t come across me, yet I needed somewhere where An Garda could eventually find me. In hindsight, a note would have sufficed.

What stopped me, ironically, was a mental breakdown I endured just at the very beginning of March. By this point, Covid was only in the low double digits, with many insisting it wasn’t a big deal. It’s funny how sure we all were that the world cared about our preoccupations, like a toddler rambling to an adult, expecting them to be impressed. Pushed past my limit, I made a desperate decision to talk about my feelings.

I had just managed to get signed up to the local Pieta House, a suicide prevention counselling organisation, before the announcement of the first lockdown. And while I benefited greatly and can’t thank my counsellor, Amanda, enough for everything, I still can’t rule out how the sudden change in expectations placed upon me had lifted my depression. In fact, soon I saw my own neurosis reflected back at me as the world around me experienced the same insecurities, lack of meaning, and anxiety. At first I felt bitter; insulted that what I had experienced for years was only now an issue for people, that my exclamations for help were met with derision and ridicule, yet theirs are met with mental health campaigns. I later realised that I was doing the very thing I’ve accused them of doing; demanding validation to take them seriously.

To feel relieved, able to forgive myself and others, and to see my experience shared by others at last was proof that the world before Covid had been gaslighting me. This revelation has been better expressed by psychologist Viktor Frankl, who described it as “Unemployment Neurosis, and by philosopher Karl Marx as “Entfremdung” (“Alienation” in English). Just because it’s taken two hundred years for the general public to experience these ideas doesn’t make them any less true.

I don’t wish to over-romanticise; the lockdown (and subsequent ones) was difficult. There was a lot of fear and paranoia. I would end up not seeing my family for five months (and then not again for another ten months after). I often had to console my girlfriend, as she was left in a state of crippling anxiety. Days filled with visits and socialising had become still, as though time itself was bored. And then there were the conspiracy theories from family who suffered from mental illnesses, causing them to erupt in rants about government control, a manufactured virus, and even accusations that I was somehow part of a global cabal. How they discovered the Illuminati hold meetings in the dole queue I don’t know, but the point is my story is similar to others’. While I wish they never had to experience what they did, I can’t apologise for feeling like not only was this time needed for myself but also that it was a time of vast improvement.

“Hell is other people” the absurdist Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, clarifying “we judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves”. This has a basis in the realm of psychology, especially when dealing with deprogramming, as environments hold massive sway over people, hence why it’s advised that the removal of toxic elements (people, coping mechanisms, affirmations) is paramount to self-actualisation. I was lucky to find myself at the beginning of the lockdown removed from the overbearing nature of “activation” schemes, interrogations by the Department of Social Protection, and people’s strange obsessions with what you do so you don’t starve to death. Something about a global pandemic has a wonderful effect, where it makes people care less about others. I found myself with no expectations, no intrusions, no inquisition. The change was instantaneous. I went from being on the verge of suicide to happier than I had been in years. I had the mental clarity needed to reflect on life and its intrinsic value. I realised that, though the world says otherwise, I hold it in my heart that life, by the sheer fact it exists, is worthy of existence and should have no burden placed upon it to argue this. It is not your obligation to meet my standards, nor mine to meet yours. No more than an abuser may escape their wickedness by demanding their victim assert themselves, we may not ignore our cruelty by expecting the shunned to gain our acceptance. Once I realised this, things only improved from there.

I continued this introspection, partially to help with others losing their grasps on their lives. Thankfully, by this point, my initial cold indifference had subsided and given way to a stoic altruism, wishing to use my hardened resilience to help to parse together some semblance of meaning. I noticed this belief in people that their lives had been placed on pause, dubbed “The Great Pause”. I struggled at first to relate to the concept; I had been out of work for so long I had forgotten how much you build your life around work. This explains my annoyance with the phrase “What do you do?” I had to remind myself that for many people their life is entangled with their career to the point where it’s easy to believe the first twenty-five to thirty years are all building up to your actual life, the life that counts. This goes to explain why Covid brought the sensation of being on pause yet simultaneously resulted in feelings like FOMO (fear of missing out), that your life is happening somewhere else. Many a night I’ve suffered from this feeling, as though I was embarrassingly late to my own future. I soon realised this wasn’t true either.

A life without need to justify itself already justifies itself. It doesn’t need to put on airs and graces, it just is. Thus, this is your life. This is the moment you are living in right now, whether you be a reader, a student, or even one of the judges of the Hubert Butler Essay Prize (who most certainly is looking very well today, if I may say so). It’s rudimentary but try to think about that for a second. If you radically accept life, accept that you are alive right now, outside of your job, your family, your accomplishments, everything becomes clear. You don’t need to put on a show or to be doing something to be alive, to be living your life. Your life isn’t happening somewhere; this is your life! You can’t be missing out on anything if you are where you’re alive. The problem isn’t that you can’t reach out and grab your wants, but rather that you’re refusing to own the life you have, to own this moment. It’s understandable why people wish to escape, to life themselves up, to focus on work, or to an imagined future. Disassociation is how they’ve been able to cope. But for me, and I would hope many others, it’s the humbling admission that this is my life in this moment that allowed to me take on a more positive attitude, a more proactive approach to my challenges once I owned them and owed nobody an explanation.

From these lessons, I was in a prime position to make the most of the lockdown. I was able to sympathise and console those I loved. I was able to focus on myself and explore creatively, starting numerous fulfilling projects. I delved head first into the world of self-improvement, learning to calm myself, work on my thoughts, forgive others and myself, and to approach life with openness. I’ve been vegetarian for a year and a half and have recently been able to kick my dependency on nicotine after eleven years. My partner and I, while we’ve always been supportive of one another, are better communicators than we were before Covid. Reading the works of Alan Watts, Viktor Frankl, and Lao TZU has allowed me to reach greater existential understanding. And while news of the Delta variant, global struggles, and even anti-maskers can be stressful, the skills of mental resilience, self-soothing, and ownership afford me the ability to calm myself and others.

In short, how I feel can be summed up in one sentence.

I’m glad Covid happened.

Let me clarify before someone bites my head off. I am deeply saddened by those who died, all four million, three hundred and ninety thousand of them (at the time of writing). I believe the five thousand souls who have died here deserve to be mourned. But to anthropomorphise Covid is to be blinded to the truth. Never before had so much of the fragility of humanity been on naked display for everyone to see. The affluent have been shown as callous, unflinchingly naïve, and at times inhuman. Governments ranged from complete ineptitude to morbidly hysterical as they stuck their heads in the sand. Capitalists ranged from desperate denial, refusing to comply with regulations to coldly firing employees and evicting tenants. And then there were those whose arrogance, selfishness, and sheer stupidity were on full display, throwing punches for toilet paper, screaming slurs, and spreading wild conspiracies online.

I by no means am a misanthrope. In fact, just as Covid had revealed the worst in people, it also showed the awe inspiring humility and reverence from within us too. I’ve seen people give what little they had for those in need. I’ve seen people come together like never before, caring for the elderly, feeding the hungry, and schooling children. Doctors tended to the ill, risking their own lives in the process. Scientists spent months to combat a battle they didn’t even know if they could win. Because of the restrictions in place, I never met my counsellor, Amanda, at Pieta House. She was as much a stranger to me as we are, yet she helped me work through thoughts of suicide and build up by self-esteem. Indeed, it is amazing that the world was ending and yet many didn’t give up on their decency. We owe these people a debt of gratitude. Whatever you wish to focus on, the worst or best in people, Covid revealed three truths about the world.

The world had no interest in doing more than it can get away with. If it took a pandemic for people to realise they could work just as productively from home, then it shows businesses had no interest in stepping away from convention. If this is what it took for the many made unemployed by Covid and lockdowns to be protected from poverty or eviction by government intervention, then it shows economies are unsustainably dependent on perpetuating wage slavery. If it took this much chaos for people to finally feel like they could evaluate their lives, then it proves life before Covid had no interest in life satisfaction.

While the prospect of enduring inactivity and isolation appeared cosmically horrifying on par with the works of H. P. Lovecraft or Junji Ito, with respects to the millions we survived, it didn’t kill us to cooperate and respect one another. We didn’t perish doing what was right, sacrificing a fraction of our lives to slow the virus, create a vaccine, and to immunise entire countries. Contrary to those who stood to profit from us, we didn’t plunge into economic turmoil by agreeing that people should have help from their governments. We survived every doomsday prediction from capitalists, naysayers, and conspiracy theorists; each one proven false empirically. This bodes incredible for our future combating seemingly insurmountable tasks. Imagine how well we can tackle climate change if we strived ahead with the same sense of duty and hope we displayed.

Imagine a carbon neutral world powered by renewable energy if we moved away from profit and towards hope. Physical and mental health could be free and widely available if we all collectivised. Imagine a world with no unemployed and poverty through UBI, where no one had to work to survive or could hoard wealth. These aims have been mocked by the very people we’ve proven wrong. Let’s keep proving them wrong.

Had you tried to warn the world about Covid years ago, about the months spent isolated in our homes, hospitals on the brink of collapse, and millions of deaths, you would have been thought foolish. Not just because of the improbability, but rather because of our insulating egos believing ourselves so special and unique that we could live outside anyone else’s influence. The truth is far more humbling. We are not distant planets spinning outward into space but rather a belt of asteroids, ricocheting off one another, setting future events on a galactic scale in motion. We have learned that our lives overlap; just as we irreversibly affect each other, we too are at the mercy of strangers.

Kindness echoes.

I could have worded this essay differently and gotten the same point across. Had I said the likes of Jeff Bezos or Albert Bourla had benefited the most, I would still come to the assertion that it is unwise for tycoons to watch like Nero as the proverbial Rome burns. Had I said the miraculous mRNA vaccines and research were the winners, I would still be saying that trust in scientific research and not the mad ramblings of online crusaders was paramount to our survival. I could have said many things, but that wasn’t my answer. I felt bad, like I was cheating or making light, but that is the truth; I feel like I benefited from Covid. I had forgotten, whether through gaslighting, complacency, or just not noticing until now that we’re all equal. As valuable, as good, as bad, as amoral, as innocent, as guilty, as kind, as stupid, as human as each other. I had forgotten that I am no better and no worse. I had forgotten my failure was as forgivable as anyone else’s. I had forgotten that my life was as vulnerable, as destructible, and therefore as valuable as anyone else’s. I had learned so much in his time, but most importantly that the truth, however uncomfortable, should be unapologetic, unashamed, and unflinching, because there are far worse things in this world than someone not agreeing with you. And the truth of Covid is most uncomfortable.

We are all we have. And we must love one another. That starts with loving ourselves. If it took Covid for me to accept all that, then I am thankful.

Thank you Covid. Thank you for everything.

Humanity
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About the Creator

Conor Matthews

Writer. Opinions are my own. https://ko-fi.com/conormatthews

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Nice work

Very well written. Keep up the good work!

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