This week I had to enter an office full of people for a short time.
Overall, it was a bit like visiting a foreign country that I’ve watched lots of old documentaries about. Like I’m the hero of my own story, except my story is a lot of half memories and wistful looks at mundane things.
Over the entire floor containing maybe a couple of hundred perfectly lovely people, there was one person masked.
‘Hello, fellow mask wearer’, I said.
He smiled (with his eyes, you can tell) and said, ‘I’m getting over the flu.’
His desk was next to mine.
I’m exceptionally grateful that he saw fit to wear a mask to protect those around him. I did wonder why no-one else was even remotely concerned.
But hey, it’s not my place to speak up, so I didn’t.
There was a conversation about a social event, at a pub. ‘Would you like to come?’, the very kind people who had just met me asked.
I had to explain that pubs, restaurants, theatres, gigs (you know the list) were out of my playground now.
People’s eyes widened. ‘Really?’, they said. ‘That’s awful.’
I nodded in agreement, because it is indeed awful. But mid-kind social overture is not the time to launch a manifesto on collective covid related change, so I just smiled.
When I got home, I’d missed a delivery and now my packages were having a wee holiday at the post office. ‘No worries’, chirped the text message I received, ‘Just pop in here in the next three days, join the queue of people crammed front to back for 30 minutes or so, and everything will end well.’
I may be editorialising slightly, but you get the idea.
It was a no reply message, so I didn’t write the postal service a speech about the vagaries of the chronically ill and their carers in 2024.
Instead I paid someone to collect the parcel for me.
You are getting the picture, I am sure.
Every little thing is a ball ache.
…
Now, I get that life is dynamic.
I understand at a DNA level how to pivot, especially after spending two decades raising a human with complex health needs… but really.
I’m just a person. My needs are the same as anyone else’s.
At the beginning of 2020, I was very much like lots of people, with a couple of added quirks.
My son was a unique individual with some very specific and sometimes very trying needs, but in a world where doors were open to me (and with full acknowledgement of the privilege that wedged those doors open for me), I was just living life like everyone else.
But now… well, now I’m re-evaluating everyone and everything.
Especially everyone.
Now that this hellscape seems permanent, I am becoming more and more desperate to get people to really process the level of injustice here.
Covid continues. It’s still here.
And while I understand most people have been convinced they won’t get it and if they do they’ll be fine, everyone has conveniently blanked out the fact that there’s a section of the population that can’t think that way.
It seems like along with the permission to think wrongly about covid, people have also assumed wrongly that clinically vulnerable people and their loved ones are being protected by… what? Someone else? Magic pixies?
I’m fairly certain that any rational person faced with the Sophie’s Choice style prospect of putting their own (or their loved one’s) life on the line or completely giving up on having a life…
… they’d be, at the very least, unhappy with the prospect, at best they’d be fighting and they’d be hoping that others would join the fight too.
And let me be really clear, that’s not happening.
Government are silent. Healthcare is in a blink twice if you are OK kind of state. And the average person can do no more than make a sad face while they head off to the pub.
…
Whoever said ‘no man is an island’ was on the money.
It’s not actually possible to survive without connection, without community, without ackowledgement.
Just like everyone else, my son and I (and many like us) require food, water, exercise, income, medical care, social and systemic support, intellectual stimulation, yada yada.
But since the world turned a shadow dance with infectious disease into a lifestyle, all these things are compromised for us.
The basics are harder and harder to achieve.
The whole population of the world is in a climate crisis, all struggling with horrendous cost of living crunches… life is stressful for everyone. I get it.
But on top of that, society deems that people with complex health needs and their loved ones can have an extra slice of poo cake.
With no negotiation (unless I missed the memo, I don’t tend to dive int my junk mail, to be fair), a special medically vulnerable tarrif has been placed on every little thing.
Anyone who lives with disability, chronic illness, long covid or is unwell and elderly and doesn’t feel good about making any of that worse is starting to drown in the life equivalent of invisible parking tickets.
Some of them seem like a soft kind of penalty.
Lots of people have a limited social life, right?
While I can guarantee that this life in a plastic bubble is about as good for your mental well-being as repeatedly watching war movies and stabbing yourself in the earhole, I get that no-one else is responsible for filling my dance card.
It hurts but whatever.
Other challenges are minor mind benders.
How will I buy that last minute birthday card (seriously, there’s a gap in the market… supermarket delivery birthday cards are really underwhelming).
Can I really personalise a gift for someone else? Especially with my complete lack of time or skill for forward planning…
How do I demonstrate my give-a-shit in my community, my industry, my world when I can’t show my face in a gathering, meeting, demonstration?
In short, how can I be a good person on this planet when I’m excluded from safely being a part of the planet.
The real cruncher is the fact that most solutions require a financial solution.
Delivery of everything adds a premium to the things. Never being able to just pop to the shops for that missing ingredient doesn’t come cheap.
Always driving to destinations, or having no choice but to drive for amusement means a real uptick in fuel costs (sorry air quality, but seriously my car is the only guaranteed no people space and a drive feels like an adventure even when it isn’t).
And then there’s streaming services.
Those things add up.
But deep diving into New York real estate or dysfunctional visa dependent relationships multiple series at a time is all I got these days. It’s a hill my IQ is forced to die on.
These are not massive things in the scheme of actual things.
But I’ve lived a lot of years.
So to have my life reduced to pondering why I never learned to pre-purchase birthday cards is a little… underwhelming.
But the reality is, there’s something much bigger at stake.
And that’s the life of my son, and many people like him.
Folks who already have enough on their plates.
While the majority of people eschew masks, are happy to ping pong their way through infections, are unwilling to acknowledge the long term risks to their own health…
… my boy bursts into tears because he can’t see how he can ever go to his beloved musical theatre again.
… someone’s grandmother can’t see her family because there’s yet another outbreak at her aged care facility.
… someone receiving cancer treatment is toughing it through chemo wondering if they’ll be even sicker after today.
… someone with long covid is trying to work out how they can ever work again.
… someone with lupus would love to eat at a restaurant rather than fight through the pain involved in chopping up vegetables tonight.
… and someone like me is desperately trying to invent ways to keep smiles going in the house in the absence of guarantees.
And all these people are either dealing with this alone or in a population of 1/bee’s dick’s worth of their pre-2020 village.
…
Think about it, really.
Real people.
Like you.
Just trying to live.
Like you.
But the difference is, they can’t.
Because of you.
If you are one of the vast majority of people who is doing basically nothing to limit the spreading of a disease, of course.
If you are trying, then yay you. Thank you. You get a gold star and a hug (if we could give you one).
…
People who I knew previous to covid, are all up in arms about the treatment of refugees (as anyone with a functioning heart should be), proudly flying rainbow flags (as we all should be), railing at the Opposition for a planless plan to save the Australian corner of the planet with nuclear power (I’ve got nothing).
But literally no-one except a few tiring academics/doctors, a tiny group of sympathetic allies and a large group of people who are begging for their lives back is making an effort to make change.
There’d be more outrage if we banned oat milk.
We can reduce covid transmission with very simple steps, and we know what they are. We probably can’t kill it completely, but we can make an existence where we live with it easier.
For everyone.
You may think you aren’t at risk (you are), or maybe you just don’t want to think about it (you should).
But if you are not proactively trying to limit covid transmission you are doing one thing for sure.
You are condemning perfectly good people to a completely nothing life.
You can’t claim to be distant from it by virtue of where you live or how much you earn or who you vote for.
It’s you.
You are the problem.
You aren’t the hero, you are the opposite.
And you need a theme song.
Lucky Taylor Swift sings about everything.
…
I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser
Midnights become my afternoons
When my depression works the graveyard shift
All of the people I've ghosted stand there in the room
I should not be left to my own devices
They come with prices and vices
I end up in crisis (tale as old as time)
I wake up screaming from dreaming
One day I'll watch as you're leaving
'Cause you got tired of my scheming
(For the last time)
It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me
At tea time, everybody agrees
I'll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror
It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero
Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby
And I'm a monster on the hill
Too big to hang out, slowly lurching toward your favorite city
Pierced through the heart, but never killed
Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism
Like some kind of congressman? (Tale as old as time)
I wake up screaming from dreaming
One day I'll watch as you're leaving
And life will lose all its meaning
(For the last time)
It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me (I'm the problem, it's me)
At tea time, everybody agrees
I'll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror
It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero
I have this dream my daughter in-law kills me for the money
She thinks I left them in the will
The family gathers 'round and reads it and then someone screams out
"She's laughing up at us from hell"
It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me
It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me
It's me, hi, everybody agrees, everybody agrees
It's me, hi (hi), I'm the problem, it's me (I'm the problem, it's me)
At tea (tea) time (time), everybody agrees (everybody agrees)
I'll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror
It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero
Songwriters: Jack Michael Antonoff / Taylor Alison Swift
Anti-Hero lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group
Thank you - please keep writing for us - the trapped, vulnerable, and forgotten!
Yes to all the above.
And as you have previously said, I’d like to take my son to an essential hospital Specialist appointment “safely”
A recent comment by a “nurse” “oh you must be preparing for Armageddon”
FFS Seriously, I could have punched her lights out.
I don’t normally watch Spotlight CH7 but the grab of “AFTER Covid” got me. I’d like someone to tell me when it was OVER!!!!
Kerryn Phelps was the only one to mention that there were people are staying at home because of medical reasons to avoid Covid. But hey, nothing changes does it?!!!!