Sunlight through a dusty window pane
We are almost a year into the coronavirus pandemic, and our strange new life has become our norm, the virus a constant backdrop to our existence. What is shocking to me in many ways, although strangely amenable to distant, dispassionate observation, is how well I and many others appear to be handling things. A caveat here: I can only frame this in my own context, and don’t for a minute believe I am by any means worse afflicted by the pandemic than so many people. I am enormously privileged as a homeowner, someone who can work from home in (only momentarily and theoretically shaky) full time employment, a loving husband and supportive family. These go a long way, but still, I am no stranger to mental ill health and my prior experience of this has struck a note of fear in my heart- what if I end up back there?
“Back there” will forever be cemented in my mind as a mid-week morning, curled on the cork tile floor of my then-boyfriend, now husband’s old flat-share against a velvet green sofa, howling. I was completely unable to move, desperate not to go into the lab where I was undertaking my PhD research and incapable of understanding why. I loved what I did but couldn’t do it any longer. A phone call to my mum and one quiet question, “do you think you might be depressed?” mercifully allowed me to accept the reality and do something about it. I was fortunate then to be a student and have both exceptionally supportive supervisors and easy access to a counselling service. More fortunate still that one of the counsellors was training for a diploma in cognitive behavioural therapy and needed to spend more time than is usual with someone to gain experience. Over the next three months or so, sessions with her taught me how to deal with the crippling anxiety that I had thought was normal for so long. I slowly learned not to fear the worst every time one of my family got into a car for a long journey, not to call my boyfriend endless times until he returned safely from a bike ride and, most importantly, how to free myself from the relentless perfectionism and pressure that no-one but me was placing on my shoulders.
Now, six years on and in a different life, I have often been grateful for that experience and the ability it has given me to step back and to cope with difficult situations. Changing careers and buying a house at the same time springs to mind, alongside the more everyday challenges of change and learning at work. My resilience is greater, my perspective clearer. There are still huge moments of self-doubt and I will never, ever be comfortable loudly owning my achievements, but I can tolerate it.
The contrast between the difficulties we all face now and my former troubles is extreme in both scale and source. A world tearing itself apart and the global spread of a deadly virus bring with them very real, very rational fears and tribulations. We live our days by numbers, the latest being 1820. One thousand, eight hundred and twenty deaths, after nearly a year of painful, uncertain battle. This is, we can only hope, the crescendo of an increasingly discordant melody that has been haunting our sleep since the latter months of 2020- when we could all see the worsening situation and were desperate for action to halt it, while desperately sad not to be living out the plans we had made with our loved ones. Since the Christmas break, my sleep has been increasingly broken, late nights staring in horror at Newsnight leading to fretful dozing, not quite comfortable in the room that now doubles as my bedroom and my workplace while my husband teaches year tens from the kitchen/lounge/diner of our flat.
My body has been the most reliable readout of how I have felt over the last year. From near-migraines experienced mere hours after finding out how badly the organisation I work for would be affected by lockdown, to an unnerving energy poured into cleaning and trying to run during six weeks of furlough to the extra kilos that now sit around my middle as I self-medicate with comfort food and find activity increasingly hard.
My mental state is feeling a bit like a home décor concept. Shabby chic, eclectic. You learn to overlook the frayed edges of the carpet and threadbare sofa arms and accept that this is just the way you live. Maybe it just needs a lick of paint and some sunshine through the windows right now, but soon it will be dry rot, structural damage and something you can no longer handle on your own.
And yet I do handle it on my own. I’m not sure if it is the tools I learned to use during my studies or just the relentlessness of the past year. At work, the grief we felt learning that some of our team would be furloughed and that the work we all feel so passionately about paused was then trumped by painful news of redundancies within our organisation and huge loss. Successive (and, I believe necessary) lockdowns, seeing my family once since last February- all have had to be borne for a greater good, and so they have been. Someone else has always had it worse, there is always some level of gratitude to hold on to. But the lack of pure, untinged joy is taking its toll. Happiness always seems bittersweet.
Now, vaccination is our hope, and a seemingly fragile one at that. We’ve seen the NHS and wider health and care system moving mountains to deliver an ambitious programme and celebrated the numbers of people who have received at least one dose, then been knocked by doubts over strategy. Words of caution abound on resistance and new strains over the horizon. It’s a race that is shredding our nerves, demanding us to hold on just a little while longer, patch up those sofa arms and keep going. So I will, waiting for that ray of sunlight to come through a dusty windowpane and show me that the threads can be darned, the carpet replaced and better days will come.
