I think this is maybe the strangest time that I have ever lived through. I went on my trip to Scotland last week and the world seemed fairly normal. I came back and the apocalypse seems to have happened. It's surreal.
From the outset I wanted this blog to be about both recovering from financial problems and about the effect that money has on mental health. In the last few days, I've seen both suffer.
For years I've always thought that being alive here and now is maybe one of the best times and places for it to happen. The world is safe, stable and fairly comfortable. And you just assume that it is going on forever that way. When 9/11 happened the think that made me really sad was that my parents had to watch that. They had both been children during the Second World War, the most destructive era of modern history. 9/11 was the end of the big span of peace that had come out of that. And bad as it was, and all the subsequent attacks have been, I never once felt like my entire way of life was under threat. And I never once felt like that would ever change.
Like everyone, you just think that progress goes on forever. Then Covid-19 happens. It's a surreal situation that most of Europe is shut down and that here you can see shelves stripped of goods in supermarkets. It feels like we are really living through something major, some massive event that is totally changing our way of life like 9/11 never did.
Financially, it's terrifying. It's not unlikely that workplaces are going to close. There might even be mass redundancies. I don't know what effect illness is going to have on my pay. I don't think I can afford two weeks of statutory sick pay. If my daughter has to stay home from school then what happens? How do I manage that with work? They've said that for the moment they will give full pay for a government-advised self-confinement of two weeks. But what if I have to do that twice? Once for her, once for me? Nobody even knows if you can be reinfected if you get hit. What happens then?
It's crazy but for most of the people I've spoken to it is the financial aspect that worries them more than health. That is the fucking world we live in and if you want to see symptoms of a sick society then there you go. People care more about being able to pay the bills than they do about survival. We don't have our priorities wrong, society dictates our priorities. How many landlords or banks or creditors are going to say "yeah, fine, you just take your time and get well again before you worry about payment"?
You know exactly what is going to happen. People are so shit-scared of losing money or endangering their jobs that they are going to try to plough through. Instead of taking time at the first signs or symptoms, they are going to wait until they cannot get out of bed but have spluttered over half the office in the meantime.
Where I work everyone could easily work from home. Each person could pick up their PC, plug it in somewhere in the house and work quite happily. But no. The directors are not shitting it that their workforce might be wiped out by one person's sneeze. They are more scared that someone might be watching Bargain Hunt instead of working. We are going to penny-pinch our way into a total fucking disaster of endemic disease and recession. Every single SME I have worked for behaves in exactly the same way. Maybe in the tech or creative industries things are different but in traditional employers, they just cannot get away from that miserly, conservative attitude and a belief that every employee is out to fucking rob them.
I've put my job search on hold for the minute, too. It's madness to swap, walk into somewhere where I might be on probation, won't have any entitlements to company benefits and might not even have any security. Where I work is a supplier to the healthcare industry. OK, we don't do drugs and equipment but it is still some fairly important stuff. Stuff that still needs to be done. It might contract, that possibility exists, but for the minute it seems a safer place to be than anywhere else that was on offer.
Mentally it has been taking its toll. Honestly, I freaked out last night. I got caught up in just a whirlwind of what might happen. I got stuck in a cycle of reading the news, searching the internet, reading social media, back to the news, repeat. My anxiety rocketed and I got myself really terrified. I had nightmares, a lot of them, and slept really badly.
The news is dog shit. When it was something happening somewhere else we treated it as entertainment. Reality TV. We were quite happy to be spectators on the crisis in China and Italy. There were play by play reports, what figures were rising, which stats were falling. It was like a fucking sick sporting tournament.
But when it hit here it all changed. The analysis just seems to have gone and the news report changed from the big picture to this zoomed in, tight focus view of events that were happening. Here's who died, here's how many are sick. The thing I have to keep reminding myself is that these numbers mean nothing. There is no context, nobody explains a damn thing. What do these numbers mean? Nobody seems to want to publish anything like that or even look at it.
It just adds to the horror. Without meaning, it is deaths and sickness and terror. Perfect food for anyone with anxiety.
So what to do? I don't know. There's a book I love called Tribe by Sebastian Junger which is about how groups of people triumph in bad times. I keep thinking about what Junger says: everyone expected those who survived WW2 to be deeply traumatised and for there to be a generation with mentall illness. There wasn't, it just didn't happen. People rose to the challenge and flourished in amongst hell. Mental illness dropped during the Blitz.
I was also reading about the five stages of grief recently. Denial, when you pretend it isn't happening; anger, when you rage against it; bargaining, when you try to talk or buy your way out of it; depression, when it all hits home; and acceptance, when you finally reconcile the reality of it. I look back at my progress over the week and I've definitely worked through those stages and am sitting at the depression stage. Acceptance, maybe, is next.
What can you do? I've been thinking about ordering some St John's Wort. It's worked in the past for me as an anti-depressant. It gives me just enough of a little fire of happiness and confidence in the back of my mind to get through whatever shit was coming. I've done cycles of SJW when I knew a particularly hard time was approaching and it almost always works.
I've been really mindful of fitness and nutrition. I've been working out hard every day and really upped my intensity. I do the Crossfit WOD each day and supplement it with other stuff so I'm getting about 40 minutes of hard exercise. I'm also eating as healthily as I can, cut out shit and sugar and eating simple, non-processed food. A little bit of meat, a lot of vegetables and plenty of fats.
I'm making an effort to get off of the news cycle and keep away from social media. I think my blog is a good outlet because it is one way. I can write what is on my mind and I don't have to read through all the other shit. I'm restricting my news exposure as well. It just ramps up my anxiety. I found this during the financial crisis of 2008-2010. I religiously listened to PM on Radio 4 on the way home every night. I got balls deep into what was unfolding. But I also had a new baby and a wife who also had her own issues as well. Terrible combination as it drove me out of my fucking mind with stress. I can see that same cycle happening again and I need to avoid it.
I've been choosy about what I watch on TV. I don't watch much at the best of times but now I'm really picky. Nature programmes. Comedy. Art and history on BBC4. BBC Scotland does some really good reality TV, like the lives of people on fishing boats and farms and that kind of thing. I don't want to watch drama or anything dark. I want to see the good in the world.
I fucking hate uncertainty at any other time. I freak out in situations where I have no control. So I try to make myself feel that I have as much control as possible through attending to things like hygiene, cleaning the house, etc.
I will not lie. I am incredibly scared. I kind of live alone (apart from the few days I have my daughter) and this fucks up social interaction. I'd just thought I wanted to join Match or something and meet a woman as I'd been single too long. But I don't see many women being eager to date during an epidemic. There's going to be a lot of loneliness and it is in the loneliness that I feed my anxiety. The pornography of news and science websites. Of ruminating. Loneliness is not something I figure is going to go away any time soon. Probably get worse.
All I can hope for is that some good news breaks in the next few days.
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