Fragmented

Lockdown 2020 has changed everything, and yet for me it just seems to be another phase in what, in my darker moments, feels like a long drawn out fragmentation of life. The reality is that I could trace that fragmentation all the way back to childhood, so perhaps the lesson is simply that nothing is constant, everything is temporary, and Lockdown 2020 is just a more extreme hammering home of that fact.

An article circulated the social media feeds not long after this began. The headline said something like “the thing you are feeling is grief” and my response was “yes, I’m quite familiar with that” and I didn’t bother to read.

The most recent cycle of grief began in 2015 when I realised that, after seven years, I just could not continue to survive in a house sandwiched between two houses that contained two very different, but equally intrusive nightmares.

Despite the neighbours, our home was in a lovely spot with open views, and a two minute walk to a woodland path that connected to an infinite selection of walking options. My connection to nature has rarely been stronger – red fox, roe deer, weasels, brown hare, buzzards…. and not just random animals, specific animals that I came to know and recognise. Specific animals who, I like to believe, became familiar with us in their landscape, and allowed us to pass through without them feeling the need to hide. Hours and hours of solitude among the wild things, just me and my greyhound. It was hard to let go.

Around that time a person began to present herself as my friend and saviour, and, because I was otherwise consumed with all the drama from my home situation, and all the stress of trying to sell, pack, then move, I didn’t pick up on the signs. Even without the other distractions, I may not have picked up on the signs, because that is typical of this kind of situation. It is normal for people to be taken in with this kind of grooming and not realise they are about to be subjected to what I came to conclude was an attempt to dismantle me.

Anyway, the house we eventually bought is in the area in which she lived. It was, in retrospect, as if I walked blindly into Bluebeard’s castle. A proper, dark, blood-soaked fairytale.

I could write reams about the insidious way she behaved, but suffice to say there is a meme that goes around that says something like “if you have to do internet searches to try and understand the way someone is behaving towards you, it’s emotional abuse”. It took me six months to grasp a gossamer strand of opportunity to part ways, it took at least another six months of holding firm before she stopped trying to get back in, and it took me a lot longer to understand it all, and name the patterns of her behaviour.

I have never really felt at home here. I have tried my damned best, but the grief for “my landscape”, the solitude of all those glorious paths and traffic-free wee roads, the grief for my first garden which I crafted into something glorious, has been a consistent companion with not enough in the way of replacements. I suspect I might have made a better job of the adjustment if I hadn’t had to contend with the Bluebeard person, and the fact that I still consciously take steps to avoid bumping into her. It is what it is.

I remind myself that I have a lot more than many other people, and push on.

A year ago my beautiful familiar greyhound super-being departed, and my heart broke, fragmented into a million pieces, and that’s when grief really came to stay. I read that grief never really leaves, we just make space and learn to live with it, and I have nothing with which to refute that. He has gone, and our adventures are over. He was never “just a dog”, there was so much more to it all. He quite literally saved my life on many, many dark days.

In November my Significant Other was hospitalised with severe anaemia, requiring transfusions of five pints of blood, and a pint of iron. He went through a plethora of tests and it was concluded that he had a polyp in his stomach that was causing the blood loss – we still don’t know where that went, as there were no tell-tale signs – but the polyp turned out to be benign. Camera equipment at the other end determined that he had a growth of bowel cancer. So this winter has been defined by hospital visits, tests, an operation, the sight of him post-op in critical care – something I never want to see again, recuperation, and then a three month stint of chemo cycles just to ensure no random cells were left behind after the operation. We are on the last cycle of chemo now.

And so we find ourselves in the “vulnerable” category, with a letter from the Scottish Government full of instructions about how Himself should remain at home, and also remain two metres away from me, at all times.

Perhaps if we had a large house, maybe with a couple of wings, or at the very least, a second toilet, we could feasibly achieve the specifications in the letter, but we do not have that privilege. We decided that the safest option was for us both to do Shielding together. The strangest part of it all is that in all this social media noise about isolation, and lack of social contact, I can tell you that I am one who has given up all my solitude. Surprisingly, four weeks after we shut ourselves in, I can report that it has been relatively good fun.

We have stopped watching daily news. We have stopped watching misleading counts on how many cases there are – with virtually no testing there is no way that these figures can be anywhere close to accurate. I have stopped reading posts from people on Facebook who believe this is all a conspiracy, and that they shouldn’t be in Lockdown “because it’s only sick people and old people who die”. I’m quite comfortable changing my opinion about people who are flirting with eugenics, and willing to sacrifice my up close and personal life because they want to go to the cinema. We have found a way to exist that allows us not to spend all day and night in abject anxiety – that’s quite an achievement for me.

Our biggest challenge has been food security. We did not bulk buy. We had some cushions from previous attempts to prepare for a worst-case scenario Brexit, but we had no chance to bulk buy because frankly the priority was getting Himself out of his workplace and home as soon as possible. We tried to organise online delivery from the two supermarkets who serve our area. One had no slots available for 3 weeks, one we managed to book a slot two weeks ahead. As usual, the most vulnerable are at the bottom of the priority list, and this scenario simply magnifies that. It is only this week, FOUR WEEKS after we went into Shielding, that we have been given a guaranteed weekly online delivery slot to acquire food. We have been acquiring food in an ad-hoc manner from several local businesses, at least one of which caused me anxiety because of the way the man handled delivery on our doorstep. Two local businesses come out shining, so we will continue with them, but the relief of having our delivery slot is almost as overwhelming as the occasional, usually once a day, dip into The Reality Of Covid19.

I chose to illustrate this post with fragments of sea pottery from my collection. I cannot even walk on the beach. We are not supposed to leave the house. We have gone for two walks since this began, both at 4am in the dark when no-one is around. I have spent several years craving my old haunts which were so people-free it was quite unbelievable, and now I find myself craving any walk here, despite knowing that there has rarely been a walk from my doorstep where I can arrive home without having met anyone.

It’s not that I dislike meeting people, and I have a great respect for “micro-friendships”, but there is something very healing about walking in nature uninterrupted, especially when there was a long period where I had to deal with intense, unhealthy human interactions from several sources.

Everything has changed, and it’s OK to not be OK with that. There’s no right way to do this, but it would be inspiring if fewer people were so intent on selfish attachment to their own exceptionalism. It is quite simple – if they have lungs, they are susceptible, and if they are susceptible, they are capable of spreading it to others. I don’t understand why that is so difficult to grasp for so many.

A lifelong dance with depression, anxiety and PTSD means I am already aware that the trauma and post-trauma of Covid19 is going to affect people, whether they are infected, or not. Just re-reading this post before deciding whether to press “publish” tells me I am channeling trauma through my fingertips. Everything is fragmented.