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Restrictions started to lift, and I got a little crazy. That’s the short version of the story. Here’s the longer version, with my heartfelt apologies for being gone so long.
I was doing fine, or something like it, when I felt that people were taking things seriously. It was startling and disorienting, going out to pick up groceries and finding the streets practically empty in the middle of the morning. I didn’t love it on its own terms. But it at least felt as though the situation was in hand. If we could stick it out until test and trace came online, or until a reliable treatment was found, we’d be okay — that was the story I told myself, when I was doing all right. I was better suited to the circumstances than most. I’d manage.
Reader, I have not been managing since maybe VE Day.
The messaging from the government changed. People started going out more, ignoring the signs in the grocery shop, passing too close in the street. The death toll kept climbing. A government advisor drew public ire, but faced no material consequences, for flagrantly ignoring lockdown on his wife’s birthday. Test and trace began, before it was ready, and almost immediately started missing cases in the wild. I stopped going outside unless I had to. I couldn’t cope with the new suite of uncertainties generated by the premature effort to go ‘back to normal’ — I didn’t trust anyone I encountered outside to be taking the appropriate precautions, or keeping abreast of the science. I didn’t want to get anyone sick. I didn’t want to get sick. Have you looked up images of Covid-19 lung transplants? I do not recommend it unless your stomach is strong and you are well equipped with hand sanitiser already.
Then police in Minneapolis murdered a Black man in broad daylight, with witnesses, and the world exploded into a necessary reckoning almost overnight. All at once, my friends and loved ones around the world were in the streets protesting — in some cases, fearing for their lives — and the very best I could do was donate to bail funds and funeral GoFundMes, and hope for their safety.
And then a UK newspaper leaked the government’s plan not only to ignore the results of its consultation on the Gender Recognition Act, a retrograde piece of legislation that causes direct harm to the majority of trans people in England, but to press ahead with a plan to ‘preserve single-sex spaces.’ This is a transphobic dogwhistle broadcasting state intent to legislate transness out of existence to the best of its ability. I just about collapsed.
There were protests in Oxford, for Black Lives Matter and for Rhodes Must Fall. I couldn’t go to any of them. I could barely get it together enough to log on and work from home in the morning. All that avoidance coalesced into anxiety of the kind I hadn’t had since my last year of university; I was out of the habit of managing it, so it escalated. Between Covid, terror for the safety of my friends of colour around the world, and abject defeat over the transphobic hate that has poisoned my miserable goddamn country through and through, I couldn’t find a reason to get out of bed. So I didn’t. On my 27th birthday, I went outside for the first time in over a week, to sit on a park bench with a book for about an hour before scurrying nervously home.
I have since pulled it together enough to let work know that I am struggling. I’m working my way back to functionality, one exhausting day at a time. Needless to say, I didn’t manage to keep up with running, or any of the other things I thought I would keep up with when this was still a new way of life.
A friend of mine shared this on Twitter earlier this evening, and because it’s pertinent, I’m linking it here:
I’m at the top right corner. We’re aiming for bottom right in the first instance, because the alternative is that I fuck up at work in a properly unsalvageable way. Once shit is together, we can start the leftward trudge toward ‘everything’s great.’
But for now, I’m at the top right, which is why there haven’t been regular updates to this newsletter. It’s nobody’s fault. You take a couple of unpredictable body blows on top of an extant and ongoing pain, sometimes; it happens, and the best you can do is respond. I am trying to respond better. I am hoping that doing so will entail writing more frequently, if only to exorcise some of the horrors (and pass them on, through the magic of the internet, to you).
Climbing hand over hand to the top of Functionality Mountain,
W