Lockdown MK II, Mental health and the value of getting to know your immediate neighbourhood

 

Sometimes it's impossible not to be angry about the fact that, nationwide, we're in a second lockdown. This one's slightly different for us as we're not sharing a house with a tweenager trying to engage with her school work online - but we're still here, working from home as we have been since March, now settled firmly into the 'new normal' and with the same minor joys, minor frustrations and utter outrage at more or less the same things we had all those emotions about the first time around. 

First, that whole "Working from home? Wow, what do you do with all that free time on your hands?" thing. I've seen it again and again in the media, in magazines and newspapers, all urging us to learn a new skill, discover our bake-off genius while in Lockdown 2. Claw back some time to go forest bathing, or plan your dream holiday, or feck off to the coast for the day ignoring the national restrictions just so you can take a few badly lit photos for your instagram feed. Screw you! I'm ten times busier than I ever was when I was working on-site. Working from home is STILL working!

I suspect that a large part of why we are in a second lockdown stems from that breathing out, that relaxation of everyone's judgement, or perhaps that simple ignorance of the first lockdown, or wearing a mask or washing your hands that vast swathes of the population have been guilty of. Simply put, as before back in March, people will not change unless something changes them and the majority of people who have not been directly or personally affected by COVID are still the same selfish shitbags they were last time around. 

For me, this year has impacted my mental health in ways that I wasn't anticipating. It's always been a bit of a swinging pendulum between moments of joy, and moments of deep despair but the arc of the swing feels even more pronounced than it was 24 years ago when I came very close to losing it entirely, and was at the deepest trough of a depression that I never thought I'd be able to crawl my way out of. Lots of things saved me (meds were not one of them) but this time around depression isn't in it, it's more a sense that there are good people and bad people in the world, and sometimes you have to develop X-Ray vision to see through the bad people to weed out the good, they are so thick on the ground. 

The most valuable mental health lesson I have learned this year is that my wife was a colossal part of 'saving me' first time around, and she's been a huge part of keeping me afloat mentally this time round too. With the aforementioned health issues I've already gone over on the blog, she was the one who kept things going, like she always does anyway but to an even greater extent this year as my body wasted away. It was initially really hard to ease off the throttle for certain things and let myself be looked after, and I still find it hard even now when she's trying to be helpful but I see it as 'trying to take control' when it's really anything but (FWIW we both have this problem in different ways, not because we're control freaks but because we're so used to being self sufficient I guess). 

Second valuable lesson I've learned is that work is not the be all and end all. Though our team is working ten times harder than before, we are all beginning to see the worth in not being chained to an office chair / desk for 7.5 hours a day, on top of the hour long commute most of us have either end of the day. If there has been one huge boost to my mental health, it's not driving on a daily basis. 

To that end, mostly because we're trying to avoid the above mentioned social media twats who feel the need to publish photos of themselves blithely ignoring lockdown, we've been avoiding going out - other than for much-needed walks around our locale to get a bit of fresh air and get away from the house. We've been walking the same routes, seeing the same places and taking that much needed exercise ever since March and though secretly we'd all probably admit we're bored to tears with certain bits of where we live, we still walk those routes and feel like we know our neighbourhood better than we ever did before. 

This year has always been about clawing back the positives from the massive wall of negatives everyone is going through. Taking no small delight in things like seeing Trump's "end of presidency" press conference mistakenly being held in a lumber yard was just too, too good and boy did we ever need to A) see him on his way out and B) see him being set on his way in such a shambolic fashion. Now hopefully we'll get rid of our own band of twats in government and really make 2021 something worth celebrating.