I tried to have a ‘post-pandemic’ holiday recently.
My son and I drove a very long way, armed with air purifiers and masks and things with which to coat vulnerable body parts. We had hoped to see friends in my home town and somehow people dodge while we visited some places we were accustomed to visiting.
In a perverse fuck you from the skies, it rained for 23 out of 24 figurative hours of our visit. So, we had no choice but to pretty much stay inside, alone.
And then pack up our mitigations and drive a long way home again.
…
I never thought keeping covid out of the body of my disabled son would be easy, and to be fair it isn’t entirely impossible.
But maintaining a life, as his primary carer has proven to be actually, depressingly not a thing.
While the day to day goes on as the day to day does, every single moment unfolds with an annoying desire to sigh like Al from Happy Days.
As a unit, my son and I do every thing we can do. Yet every single thing is profoundly compromised.
In order to avoid the risk of covid infection, we can’t go inside where people are. We can’t spontaneously join in a group event. We can’t accept invitations without a PhD’s worth of questions that literally no one wants to be asked.
And as the responsible adult in the room, I see few workable options to make that change.
Don’t get me wrong, I am planning like a human whiteboard, constantly setting up situations that approximate ‘normal’ but the reality is none of them are normal.
I’m turning cartwheels to create some kind of fun for my son and I’m not going to lie, keeping tears out of my eyes while we go through the motions is hard.
Seeing the disappointment in his eyes is more than I can bear most days.
Feeling the dread that it may never change is inexplicably awful.
I’m doing a solid girl look trying to find joy in the situation I am in, but I’m coming up pretty blank.
…
As far as I can see, there’s one very specific reason for that.
Life has been de-peopled.
Every single thing that happens now is something I have set in motion.
Every task, every thought, every thing is on me.
There are very few individuals left to speak to, and any speaking has to be modulated for fear of losing them.
There’s an overwhelming yet largely unspoken expectation that I should simply accept without question that ‘everything is OK’. I am told in strained outside voices that behaviour that specifically puts my child’s health at risk is a legitimate choice for other people.
I often wonder what people who are not in the same situation as us would do if the roles were reversed - if it was their child or parent or spouse that was at risk.
And then I remember that everyone is at risk, albeit on a different scale, and they either don’t know or don’t care.
This way of life genuinely feels like some subtle form of abuse, and my primed to not flinch Irish heart has made me progressively disengage from most of the people I used to know. Purely because there seems no healthy way to connect with people who live as though I don’t matter.
I have retreated into a surreal life of nothing except work, household tasks and media binging.
There’s no random texting of stupid discoveries, no inconsequential conversations about ephemera, no spontaneous trivial fun.
What I wouldn’t give to walk into a cafe the morning after a night out and order breakfast. Or meet up with friends for a drink in a pub. Or have a meal in someone else’s house.
Having to accept that not only are those experiences gone but also the people with whom I used to share them is the stuff of mournful break up songs. Watching from a distance as others revel in these experiences, fall ill, ‘recover’ and continue on is the stuff of Orwell.
…
De-peopled life is profoundly exhausting, at a cellular level.
There’s no reprieve, ever. It’s all task and no completion. And it is all tinged with sadness that makes me oddly compelled to put on a floaty dress and stare wistfully out to sea.
Acceptance that I am not anyone’s responsibility, and yet I’m holding the weight of the world on my shoulders for infinity isn’t coming easily.
I understand that a life without people is nirvana for some humans. It is not for me. Not even a little bit.
And it makes me question a lot.
The majority of my pondering centres around how other humans reconcile simply dropping people out of their frame of reference.
Obviously, the easiest place to throw this pondering is at government.
To be the product of what seems like complete abrogation of social responsibility is galling. It feels illegal, to be honest. The idea that a government can simply say it is protecting the vulnerable and yet do absolutely nothing was almost inconceivable prior to the pandemic.
I mean, saw the treatment of refugees, the LGBTQIA+ community and our indigenous population and was outraged. I protested. I donated. I tried. Not hard enough I am sure, but I tried to at least participate in agitating for change.
From my privileged cis, straight, white, employable (just) standpoint I’m trying now to at least share the truth of the situation we are in now. It’s having zero impact but I’ll keep on doing it simply so it’s out of my body for a millisecond.
But, the idea that there are people in power who could make meaningful change and choose not to… that’s a solid bag of dicks.
Beyond government, there’s the systemic inertia.
The fact that public shared spaces could be made exponentially safer for everyone, but just aren’t seems… careless.
The idea that accessing healthcare is now a gauntlet of pathogens would be ridiculous if it wasn’t terrifying.
The reality that social systems have moved forward by loudly demonstrating to the public that mitigations are not necessary or even moderately important, puts a lump in my throat that genuinely hurts.
Are we ever going to be able to do normal stuff again?
Am I ever going to have a genuine unfettered moment of human contact again?
And those questions bring me to the people, the individual humans I used to feel I knew so well.
I can’t quiet the pondering about the people.
The broader population who seem to me to have chosen ignorance and the risks inherent in repeat infection are one thing.
But the individuals I used to know and love… those people live rent free in my head and my heart now. Like flickering View Master images that surf painfully from my chest to my eyeballs multiple times a day.
I have to reconcile the reality that I’ve become too hard.
I mean, I get that the requirement to keep my specific kid alive is hard. But that’s my job. It’s not something I ever had to ask others to participate in before. I just did what I had to do and people who gave a crap or who I was paying followed my lead.
What’s challenging is understanding how people who used to care, have so dramatically distanced themselves from the attachment that mandated that care. I know how I have done it, and it looks like a combination of Sigourney Weaver facing the drippy alien and Juliet Stevenson in a therapy session.
But the people who I used to know…
They know me. The actual me.
They know exactly how much pressure the pandemic added to a parenting job that was never a dance through a fairy meadow.
But as time moved on from the early days when everyone felt the need for caution, something unexpected happened.
As mitigations were progressively dropped, few people spontaneously asked how I was handling the increasing pressure. People asked me what I needed them to do to maintain social contact, and that was both practical and welcome. But there was no acknowledgement that my life had essentially frame shifted and that was likely to have some kind of impact.
And it’s not like there wasn’t an appreciable change in my demeanour. I have never had a good poker face. Nor am I good at staying quiet if something is bothering me.
But it became abundantly clear that people didn’t want to know, even more clear that pretending that life was normal was far more important.
As I slowly realised that I had become a ball ache to other people, I pulled away. There’s nothing worse than knowing you are the problem, right?
What I didn’t expect was that those most close to me wouldn’t at least try to pull me back in somehow. That my well being would cease to be anyone’s job. I wasn’t expecting a caravan of love, and to be fair I would have met it with a polite, ‘there are people in worse situations than me’.
But I didn’t expect this.
I didn’t expect to live in a veritable people desert.
And I definitely didn’t expect my emotional range to atrophy to a spectrum ranging from frantically pretending to just about breathing to perpetually leaking from the eyeballs
I get that there are few practical solutions in a situation like mine. But also understand (trust me on this one) that it’s not practicality but emotional support and joyful distraction that’s required.
Now that we’ve reached the point where the world is marching on to an admittedly uncertain future… people like me (and my son) are literally no one’s job.
Not the job of government.
Not the job of social systems.
Not the job of anyone.
…
As the comforting voice of Esther Perel said in a podcast published to celebrate the recent new year, the quality of a life depends principally on the quality of the relationships within it.
After a not struggle free childhood, a perverse career path and two decades of parenting a progressively disabled child, I thought I thought I was pretty tough.
I thought I was preternaturally resilient.
I was confident I could pivot like Baryshnikov in response to pretty much anything.
But I realise now that all those self-help super skills were built in the context of there being people around me who gave a shit.
And I realise that because all those people are gone.
I never, ever expected that.
So, as the work year kicks off, for the first time with the realisation that all the safety nets are gone, wish me luck.
Or make the decision to put on a mask a few times this week.
Or ask if the cafe you have breakfast in could crack a window or switch on an air purifier.
Or call your friend with Long Covid and ask how they are.
Or… forget the practicalities and just ask anyone you love how they are doing.
We can’t live in a world where we just forget people.
Can we?
As we collectively enter the fifth year of this hell scape, my answer is a solid maybe, uttered in the sexy tones of one Jim Morrison.
People are strange
When you're a stranger
Faces look ugly
When you're alone
Women seem wicked
When you're unwanted
Streets are uneven
When you're down
When you're strange
Faces come out of the rain
When you're strange
No one remembers your name
When you're strange
When you're strange
When you're strange
People are strange
When you're a stranger
Faces look ugly
When you're alone
Women seem wicked
When you're unwanted
Streets are uneven
When you're down
When you're strange
Faces come out of the rain
When you're strange
No one remembers your name
When you're strange
When you're strange
When you're strange
All right, yeah
When you're strange
Faces come out of the rain
When you're strange
No one remembers your name
When you're strange
When you're strange
When you're strange
Songwriters: Tomoki Kikuya
People Are Strange lyrics © Bmg Rights Management (uk) Limited, Doors Music Company, Lantis Co Ltd
Beautifully said. I feel like we're living in the Twilight zone.
Thank you... it really does.