I’ve always struggled with mood swings but since Covid-19 bulldozed into all of our lives, they are more like mood frickin’ theme parks. In the course of one long locked-down morning I can wake up numb, cry into my breakfast cereal, pull myself together and soar to new heights of hope and inspiration, then after a couple of hours of frantic productivity, resign myself to a kind of subdued acceptance with a side of anxiety for the rest of the day.
I remember (as we all must) the very first I heard of the virus. I was in New Zealand with my lovely in-laws who were reading out the news over breakfast. It’s tempting to imbue such moments with prophetic meaning, to believe that I felt something shift in the universe, but the truth is I barely looked up from my latte. Back home in the UK I read an online diary of a woman locked down in Wuhan and started to get the first horrible stirrings at the edge of my mind, a kind of distant yawning dread. Still it was quite possible, then, to relegate it all to the Tragedies That Don’t Affect Us box, or even, with an overactive imagination like mine, to the realm of dystopian fiction or film. Terrifying but still light years away from our here and our now.
Then suddenly it was here and now, in mainland Europe and the UK, and everywhere else for that matter.
Italy got me the worst. I’m not proud of how much more Italy affected me than China, but in some ways it makes sense; it was my home for a big chunk of life (nine years). It’s also because the closer a disaster is to us physically and culturally, the more like ‘us’ the victims are, the more we are affected. This is a horrible logical shameful understandable truth. My newsfeed was full of stories from friends in Rome and it all felt so very close and so utterly terrifying and so desperately sad. And the worst thing, perhaps, was seeing it all played out and knowing the same was coming to us, and that we were woefully unprepared and being led by clowns (at best). I was awake half the night, would fall into a deep sleep and then wake up and have a moment of happy nothingness before the grim reality — or rather, unreality — began to seep in.
It was a surreal calm before the storm, waiting for Covid to really take hold of the UK, but it was also the moment of biggest upheaval. A frantic dash to get to a safe place before lock down, to hang onto our jobs, figure out how to work from home, how to be alone, be together, be productive, rest because we don’t have to be productive, evolve new ways of working and socialising, stick with familiar routines, help others, look after ourselves.
Resistance and disbelief gave way to a kind of surrender, an enjoyment even of the slowing down and the fewer options and the decreased FOMO. And now the weird and awful thing is that I’m not nearly as affected by our horrendous daily death toll as I was by the rising numbers in Italy and Spain and France a few short weeks ago. I read the headlines and know in my head that terrible, previously unthinkable things are happening, but my heart just can’t catch up. The numbers no longer feel like real human lives, they are becoming mere numbers, lines on a graph curving too steeply upwards.
Every time I try to get a handle on what is happening, I find that the opposite is just as true. It’s exhausting and exhilarating, calm and anxious, grounding and destabilising, empty and full, restful and frantic. We’re united but isolated, it’s a leveller (on some level) but it’s exposing and compounding the horrible inequalities in our societies. It’s exciting and boring, compassionate and judgemental. We cannot breath freely but the planet is finally breathing.
I suppose the truth is that we cannot be expected to come to terms with Covid-19 at all while it’s still wending its deathly way around the globe. If this experience is to teach us anything, it is surely that we have to be much more patient, much humbler than we were before, and wait to see what the world has in store.
