Not to be Dramatic or Anything, but… Hell is Empty and All the Devils Are Here
Denial is the opiate of the masses! But, as I sit and type away, I feel like a sim programmed to say “the end is nigh”!
I feel a sense of anger. Anger at myself and the world right now. There are many reasons for this. Things are still just as bleak as they were in 2020, and we have come full circle back to where the cracks started to show: the month of March. I think reflection on this requires a certain level of honesty, absent from how we speak currently.
Though I feel a lot of guilt for participating in what I will call Covid Cultism. I have only recently begun to pick apart our “new normal” and how I feel about it. Obviously, this means I have to write about it. This piece is less of a typical reflection where I, like many writers this week, commiserate the life before Covid or reenact The Scream (from behind this screen). I am just tired. Tired of pretending that this pandemic is not still excavating my last remaining brain cells. Tired of feeling more disillusioned by the day and ignoring it. Tired of rejecting the want to cry doing mundane chores when I feel like there is no use. I am currently wearing my favourite sweatshirt over my pyjama bottoms to avoid laundry.
I, for one, am TIRED of guzzling the Cool-Aid and hiding a stained tongue. I feel like I am on the crash-side of a sugar rush and denial is the sweet treat that landed me here.
The world right now is black and white, but the contours of conversation are still muddy shades of grey. We know the problems and how to fix them. We have even peeked behind the veil of ignorance as John Rawls would hope. But what do we do now?
After my piece on the Christmas period, I realised I first thought about how the pandemic would change everything around day fourteen of the first lockdown. I started to lose my mind on day fifteen. But the real issue is I did not think I needed to say that out loud until day three-hundred and sixty-seven. Let me explain.
You see, the pandemic made us all a lot more honest about the state of the world as reality slowly started to collapse around us. The cardboard cutouts of our leadership thinned, flapped and tore in the wind. We have all been made aware of fragile our societies have always been. Ecosystems of capitalism were shaken harder than my first goldfish fresh out of the pet store at age seven. Our lines of defence seemed to pale and quake in the face of Coronavirus. Like contestants on Total Wipeout getting demolished by four big red balls, there is a shared sense that we have all been beaten to pulps by a virus.
And yet, none of this seemed to matter because of fitness gurus, Tummy-Tea pushing influencers, and business insider articles helping us all boost marketing reach! This also includes us though, the general public, continuing to move through this vacuum of unknowingness as if nothing was wrong. The landscape of social media and the internet has openly displayed the effects of the pandemic. However, while we were in and out of lockdown and too swamped with specifically curated binge content to realise a growing problem. After the Joe Exotic memes had died down and Netlfix’s steady well of reality tv started to dry up. In those couple of days where people were scavenging and clawing at any semblance of normalcy, chewing and gnawing on whatever meme could suffice the thirst for community. We all reached a stage where our gut feelings seemed to sync up. Collectively, we all started to move towards communicating our disillusionment. And we did it dishonestly.
While putting together this piece, I realised something: I do not know how to speak to people. It seems like an fairly understandable statement. The pandemic has ceased many of the ways we communicate. I think, more than anything, covid has warped the way we talk and what we actually say to each other.
Long gone are the days when “hey, how are you?” was the prime greeting to really say “I’m here”. Now, it seems like a simple “hey” is a life-raft, an outstretched hand on the edge of an emergency boat as we drown in the deep end.
Everything feels like trying to bury your head in a sinkhole as opposed to sand. No matter how hard I try, avoiding the reality of what is going on in myself because of covid is unbearable. The anxiety of possibly passing or catching covid even though I’ve isolated and followed every rule to-a-T is angering to say the very least. It is so hard to come to terms with the day-to-day of this new era we are in. Tip-toeing on the timeline to avoid being too caught up in hypochondriac propaganda but also the infuriating wormhole that is anti-vax and anti-mask discourse. The continuous rising numbers of those infected and the reels of people finding new long-term (Long Covid) symptoms, unable to see their families during surgeries, and queues for test centres winding around streets, feel like the introduction to a Nolan film.
The potential tsunami of mental health problems appears to have spiked throughout the lockdowns. The compounding issues the pandemic has presented, from the virus itself to the degradation of social welfare it has exacerbated, is unprecedented to many. Youth services have experienced severe cuts that affect their services to young people. ITV News reported that calls to the Beat (an eating disorder charity) helpline “have increased by 173% over the past year”. It is estimated that up to 10 million people, including 1.5 million children, require some form of additional mental health support due to the pandemic. Children and adults are in crisis. This figure is only more damning when observing it through black and other ethnic minority groups wellbeing in research conducted by the Office for National Statistics. I am also part of that statistic. I was finally pushed over the proverbial edge. I gave in to what I felt like was overemphasising my poor mental health to receive treatment. When, in fact, it was simply me finally taking more steps to treat a long-term issue, made worse by the pandemic, that pushed me to a limit I did not know I had (and never want to test again).
I have many choice words for how mental health is handled at large. I am grateful that I could address some of the issues that were challenging my daily life. I feel as though I am pumping this article with self-absorbed woes. But the reality is, every single person on the planet (though immensely privileged to exist functionally) is suffering. Whether it is mentally, physically or emotionally. Most of us are reinterpreting and reevaluating what it means to live in this time.
And it gets existential in this part of town, unfortunately. Is living existence? Is stability even possible? Can we continue hanging in the delicate balance of sanity and the insane world we are trying to come to grips with? It can get a bit melodramatic if you lean too far into that questioning. However, at least four times a day, I find myself falling into the trap as I wash my ice-cream-covered spoon at 3am.
The adverse effects of isolation have not even begun to set in for us and the pandemic is nowhere near over. It is nauseating to see the damage this pandemic is causing both socially and psychologically. We are ushering in a generation of the touch-starved and under-stimulated riddled with separation-anxiety. We are witnessing millions having to choose between their health and job security in ways more extreme than ever before.
It is exhausting to comprehend these things, even in comfortable situations where our most basic needs are met. Many people are not aware of the toll the pandemic has had on their health. The shiny appeal of hobbies disintegrated, small business ventures and craft crazes faded away into piles by the beds we are now confined to. During the first lockdown, this reality felt like a speck in the rearview, a tinfoil conspiracy. It was an out-of-sight parallel universe through our laser focus on adapting. I fear that the denial will only lead us down more troubling roads to come.
Writing this piece has taken a lot out of me, but it is merely a cry out into the void. For who I am not sure. But I am doing it to say it is okay. It is okay to feel overwhelmed with the current state of things. Many of us are pushing on because capitalism demands so. The collapse of our social fabric hinges on our continued “soldiering on”. It sucks. It all sucks. And I do not think I have a sufficient answer to get out of this feeling or adequately handle it. What I do think is important is to actually feel this feeling.
I continually write in my pieces the importance of remembering and reflecting. As a writer, it is my job to create both an archive of the things I write about and to accurately imbue them with how I feel. There is no use in historical artefacts without reflective material alongside them, with purpose and meaning. My feelings surrounding the pandemic are not (one bit) happy. I do believe there is a crucial element, when translating honesty, to presenting how we reflect on this period while we are in it.
That being said, it is my honest and humble opinion that we freely and more authentically exist and come to terms with how that feels. Or else we run the risk of otherwise prolonging our sickly sweet denial.
Services available for support:
(Covid support)
(Mental health resources)
(Eating disorders)
