I’m Ready To Give Up On A Post-Pandemic World. Here’s Why.

April 2020. The world was in lockdown, businesses were shut (some unlucky few never to reopen), streets were empty, coffee shops looked strange dark and locked. I had never seen this in my life, and dearly hoped I never would again. Onward to January 2021. In my country we had been promised “next year will be better”, over and over and over. But it was no better. It eerily echoed the previous spring. I felt sick and numb with misery, stuck doing lectures for my super-tough law degree over Zoom, crying nightly because I believed I could never graduate with the world like this. I know many people who gained something, a new skill, new hobby, someone managed to start their own business. I didn’t. During the lockdown, the endless days spent alone, trapped in my own head, I seemed to o nothing but lose. Money from being out of my hospitality job, sleep from the crippling insomnia I developed and still havent’t fully recovered from, opportunities, friends, and more importantly, time. Time is the cruellest mistress, which might sound funny coming from a 23 year old (21 when the pandemic began) in usual times, but from a 23 year old who’s lost 18 months of her life, not so. What support did I have in this time? Virtually none, honestly. I was “friends” with someone who was compltely unavailable but expected me to cater to every whim, mental health support teams became utterly exasperated with me, my sleep struggles were a source of amusement for my family and something they frequently lectured me on. Even with things having returned to some semblance of normality, I’ve been able to begin working and attending in person classes again at least, the new threat from Omicron looms far too large. I don’t know what will come next, and I don’t want to fear it, but fearing the unknown is just far too common.

I know I am not alone in these difficulties. Nature.com has reported that more than 42% of people surveyed by the US Census Bureau last December had been dealing with anxiety and depression. The group most affected were young people; perhaps because our plans were bigger, our need for social interaction greater. For me, I’m sure it’s because routine is so muh embedded into me and always has been, moreso perhaps than other people. Now, it’s not that I didn’t try. I tried desperately to find a new hobby but between my mind refusing to stick to anything and the crippling fatigue caused both by insomnia and what turned out to be fibromyalgia, I just couldn’t. I tried to form a new routine to conform to this new weirdness, but it didn’t work out. There were jobs going at warehouses and supermarkets, but my fibromyalgia makes less physical jobs with short hours hard, let alone 10 hours standing up (I hadn’t been diagnosed then and understanding of what I was really going through was piss poor at best). I tried to find something I could do from home, but had no luck. Instead, my difficulties were a source of humour in the house I needed desperatey to leave. I had planned to work nonstop over the summer, wherever would have me, and move out. It just wasn’t to be.

I know that further threat is looming. To me, it just seems that the departure and return of normal life is as cyclical as the seasons themselves, and almost directly aligned with them too. And like so many others, all I’m really doing is waiting, but not much seeing. I don’t know how to be any less blunt, but I am, as I have been for months, concerned that I am facing something more sinister than months of insomnia. I didn’t actually lose anyone to the virus, but I feel that I’m mourning something all the same. I did just put up with it, I was accused of being “childish” (frustrating as I saw other people’s struggles net them sympathy and help), but trying to go for walks, distract myself with colouring in and expressing myself with poetry didn’t fill the void somehow. Nothing could, although there were two lockdowns in which I could try to find something. Something to bridge the gap, something to replace the normality that was lost. Far too often, it feels like there is no way back. Is this our lives now? In and out of lockdown forever, not learning anything in online lectures, never able to make enough money to finally send my life in the direction I want it to go in? I have pondered what it actually means to be here too. Constant death-toll figures on the news, as well as being utterly horrifying, made me stupidly aware of just how many people are in the world, but at exactly the same time I have never felt so alone. I’ve never really known what I'm here for other than to follow routines and precedents and what I think my family wants me to do anyway. As well as lost money and opportunities, I feel that I’m grieving everyone who’s lost their lives too. It’s not normal to be exposed constantly to numbers pertaining to how many people are dead, so when you are it’s abjectly frightening. It would be rough on a person’s mind for two weeks, let alone two years. I kow everyone has experienced something similar - unless you’re a confirmed sadist I fail to see how you could ever be happy about what’s going on here - but the first step to unwinding hundreds of years of mental health repression is to take this collectively traumatic experience and share our unique perspectives on it. We don’t all experience ordinary blueness in the same way, we don’t all experience clinical depression in the same way, because we all operate a little differently. Understanding that uniqueness may be how we fix his emotionally divided world, driven part by shame, kept apart by stigma.

My heart truly aches at the thought of this going on any longer. Waiting it out another year is too much strain on my already drowning senses. The strain on my mind, mixed with my physical health difficulties and fears of the future, no matter how hopeful I try to be, is far too much, it hurts too much, and a light at the end of the tunnel is too far away. It’s something a little different for everyone; some are sick of inconsistent restrictions that are impossible to follow, others are depressed by how exciting trivial things have become, and then there are those who just miss how it used to be. But for me, it’s that hope is just becoming too painful. I will still be here, but in a more pragmatic sense, rather than a hopeful one.