DEALING WITH IT

I’ve spent time on my own before, but not like this, not week after week of it, not forced by external circumstances rather than by choice. Much of the time I’m doing fine, but occasionally the pandemic seems like a tidal wave, and the loneliness locks me to the ground so I can only wait for it to get me.

The therapist I’ve been seeing (over Skype now) has helped me to cope better with this combination of being in a crisis and being alone and I thought I’d share how I’m getting by.

Because everyone’s’ experience is unique, this post will be meaningless to many and may even annoy some. It’s probably best to stay clear if you have a surfeit of company and crave the very isolation I ‘suffer’ from, or indeed if spending time alone at home is your normal and you look askance at ‘how to’ guides from people only a month into a way of life you’ve dealt with for years.

Here are some things I’ve learned from my very personal lockdown experience:

I’ve learned to allow myself to feel down some of the time. This is a global pandemic, the first for 100 years, and it’s OK to feel panicky and uncertain. The challenge for me has been to avoid being ruled by that. I referred in my previous post to being frightened by how  frightened I was. Being more in touch with my emotions these days, and accepting that feeling a bit panicky is a completely natural response to these events, has allowed it to stop there. I don’t need to be frightened of my fear, or to allow my negative feelings to make me feel yet more negative.

I have had to accept that I can control only those things that are controllable. I can’t control the outcome of the pandemic so try not to let that dominate my thoughts. Also, Covid-19 has taken away any semblance of control over things in my life that were already hard. Strangely, rather than strengthen the sense of panic, this has allowed me, for now, to forget about those things and park them. Needing to concentrate only on survival: my survival, my parents’ survival, my company’s survival, has brought a wonderful clarity to what must be done. The rest remains locked away at the back of my mind, to be dealt with at some time in the future.

I used to be a terrible communicator. Now I’m bringing friends and relatives into my empty house with Skype, Whatsapp and Zoom. They are joined by work colleagues, arriving via Microsoft Teams. The place can seem properly crowded at times. I play poker with one set of friends, scrabble with another and do bread making video calls with a third. I try to have a proper conversation with at least one person every day (asides from her; she and I talk often). I am much less of a recluse than I expected to be and this feels like a good thing.

I ration my exposure to news. At the start, I used to hoover up Covid-19 obsessively, just as I did with Brexit. Now, I turn it off no later than 6pm. I can feel guilty about not immersing myself more fully in the horror that so many are experiencing, but doing so doesn’t help me and certainly doesn’t help them. I pick a single programme that fits into my day, usually the BBC’s PM broadcast, and try to give that one programme my full attention. I allow myself to feel horror and helplessness at the new deaths, praise and admiration at the people keeping us alive and, on occasions, anger and despair at the mismanagement of the crisis. It’s normal to feel these things and, once a day, I need to feel connected to those more impacted by the pandemic than I currently am. When 6pm comes, I try to turn off both the news and my reaction to it and, for what’s left of the day, just to live. Sometimes, just to live is enough.

I try to weave some structure into my time, separating the day from the evening (perhaps a shower at 6pm) and the week from the weekend (a proper breakfast on a Saturday morning). I try to put appointments in my calendar a few days ahead so I can see light at the end of the tunnel if I’m feeling lonely. Time can so easily become formless.

I’ve learned to take pleasure in small things: a surprise find of some ice cream in the freezer, a close-up sighting of a red kite in flight, using all seven letters at scrabble. I find I notice these things more, taking an almost inordinate pleasure from them. I think they would entirely have passed me by before.

Above all, my therapist has helped me accept my response to this terrible thing, and be kind to myself when that response is to wobble. So many of us find it difficult to be kind to ourselves. This thing is a global pandemic! It’s OK, I tell myself, to feel that I can’t cope. It’s most certainly OK to cry about it and I’ve done that too: I cried at that poor nurse who couldn’t buy food after an 18 hour shift; I cried at the staff clapping a 70-year-old survivor out of a COVID-19 ICU; I cried in sympathy with my next door neighbour, who can no longer visit his Alzheimer’s suffering wife in her nursing home.

None of this is meant to be easy.

I’ve stopped beating myself up for not finding it so.