Lockdown Lessons: Part One (of 4)

PART ONE: Lessons Learnt From A Life In Lockdown

 (1st May 2020)

It's been 35 days since Boris Johnson announced the UK was going into lockdown and amazingly enough the world has not ended. We are slowly adapting.

Watching the news from inside my shared house as an optimist with anxiety I found the panic buying of loo roll and alcohol within the first week quiet hilarious.....I wondered...Are people just going to build toilet roll forts/pubs inside their homes? 

You'd think that when our own PM contracted the virus it might bring home the reality that ANYONE can spread it....But for my housemates it hasn't made them take the necessary precautions when going in, out or throughout the house and that's really stressed me out. 

Times like these are trying enough and sometimes it's a struggle for me to keep calm and carry on, especially since I'm using this lockdown as an opportunity to work through and overcome my own mental health issues (and I never thought in a million years I'd be wearing disposable gloves to make my housemates a brew but life's just full of surprises like that).

Two of my biggest challenges so far have been that  I can't drag my housemates to the nearest sink every hour and force them to wash their hands (we have antibacterial hand wash by every sink in the house) and I couldn't force them to clean up their own mess that they left in communal areas, something that stressed me out so much that I ended up having a nervous breakdown over it due the fact that I'm slightly germophobic and that I tend not to address my own frustrations to higher authority until it's irritated me so much that I explode  (but thankfully management has addressed the issue with the household and now everyone's doing their part).

Within these last 35 days this lockdown has brought the best out of all of us and the worst out in some of us (myself included) but we've let go of it and still been there for each other. I'm fortunate enough to be able to say that some of my personal highlights of this lockdown are that none of my housemates nor I can get the exact measurement for social distancing right (it turns out maths is still our biggest enemy), we've still cooked for and with each other, chatted over brews, had fights, made up, had a lot of laughs, shared a lot of stories, had a lot of "air hugs" and shed a lot of tears and reminded each other that this is not forever and that we are all in this TOGETHER and that we need to stay at home to be respectful of the people who can't who are still out there keeping the world spinning for us all because when we do that we're helping bring this pandemic closer to an end. 

I constantly stop and think about all of the people still out on the front-lines, everyday,  putting their own issues aside in an effort to keep us all safe and (somewhat) sane including: council staff members, mail deliverers, rubbish collectors, road maintenance workers, bus drivers, cleaners of any kind, mechanics, police officers, firefighters, carers, NHS employees, drivers delivering groceries or prescriptions, drivers of any kind getting people where they need to go, volunteers, dog walkers and babysitters, therapists, councillors, vets, farmers and any human working in a grocery store and let's not forget the other beings doing the same including: pets, birds, trees, squirrels, snails, butterflies and of course, bees (because let's not forget, it's Spring!). Without all of these individual heartbeats it really would be the end of the world and that thought alone gives me a great deal of hope that we'll get through this.

Some days are harder than others for me and those are the days I need time and space to myself to read, draw, watch shows or films I've never seen, sew, explore and listen to different music, dance or just sleep because when this is all over I want to get on with adulting and I want to be to be able to get out the door and get to places, go and explore and go and meet new people without having a full blown panic attack before I've even left my bed. My mental health issues cannot win even though it's putting up a really good fight. I love this city too much to want to keep hiding away when it has so much to offer me and I have so much to offer it in return and lockdown has, yet again, made me realise that I have no clue what I'm doing and that's one of the most beautiful things about life and I'm fortunate to be able to take it one day at a time for me. I'm also fortunate to live with people I really have come to care about and even though I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw them (figuratively speaking of course. If you leave anything in the kitchen there's a 99.9% chance it'll sprout a pair of legs and go for a walk never to be seen again) that doesn't mean I don't love or respect them or that I don't still see them as humans with their own issues, battles and dreams. 

Lockdown is teaching me what my limits are, it's teaching me to be even more patient with my housemates, how to walk away from stuff I can't or don't know how to handle and it's teaching me that no matter how long this pandemic lasts that I'll  always find something, no matter how big or how small (and sometimes it's microscopic) to smile about not only to honour the people who we've lost through the virus, because of lockdown and all of the lives I know we'll lose before a cure is found or created, but also for myself.