Lockdown stocktake: life

Here we are nearly eight weeks into the lockdown and I wanted to comment on how it’s going, how I’m feeling now after nearly two months and the extent to which the struggles in relation to blindness that I highlighted at the start have shifted.

 

Qualifiers and provisos:

I am fortunate to live in a house with a garden and to have my Son’s company through the lockdown .  I live on a street with a strong connected and supportive community , I have friendly/helpful  local shops where I’m known, a partner and a long-established network of friends… And crucially,  I also have a permanent full-time job with a secure salary

 

I have the (mainstream and specific accessible) technology that I need to work and keep connected with friends and family,  I’ve been able to adapt, develop new skills and learn new software both for communication and recording music.

 

I’ve tried to avoid wording this to sound terribly smug, that is the last thing that I want to convey. It seems important though to put my issues and struggles clearly into the context of an acknowledgement that  financial security and social connectedness (and support) helps to bring a more secure practical and emotional base which makes it far easier to manage the lockdown . If I were socially isolated (in the real sense), without support, facing job loss, or in poor housing, I would be telling a very different story.

 

Making the best of it

I guess I’m making the best of it, but am very conscious that I’m making the best of a bad job though, or more accurately, making good in a difficult situation. I am doing pretty well at it because, I have learned to be resourceful, my motivation to live a good life is high and I’m not a cutter off of my nose to spite my face.

 

However, I hate being cooped up in the house, not being able to be with my partner properly. I miss being in the )actual) company of my friends, interrupting each other as that natural part of conversation, hearing us all talk and laugh  in a normal acoustic setting – a room, a garden, pub,  or sitting around a fire in a field.

 

I miss being at a gig with that particular intimacy of people packed in together, feeling that unique excitement of live music being played loud by musicians just a few metres away. I miss playing gigs, that wonderfully intense  experience of energy from playing in a band with other musicians and an audience responding.

 

I miss my walk and bus journey to work - even though it was often stressful, crowded, uncomfortable and smelly -  they were all things that made me feel alive and part of a vibrant city full of different people’s lives  rubbing up against each other. I miss going to the pub and to restaurants for meals.

 

I am also glad that my normally over-strong self-control has allowed me a bit of lea way to drink on four (rather than three) nights a week and to have started smoking again (although only two cigarettes a day, but it’s a start!) It seems like a fairly appropriate response to a crazy situation.

 

I am disturbed by not walking past any of Bristol’s over-large number of homeless people any more every day on the way to and from work, who, were it not for my interest in the issues, could be out of my mind.

 

I’ve had a few brief times of feeling lower than I’m used to , but I am far from personally depressed.  I do feel a strong sense of collective societal ‘depression’ though about the future – the economy, the coming social and health inequalities, the ever-growing gap between wealth and poverty widening further, of the leap in unemployment, at small businesses closing with the associated hardship and loss of hope/identity/ of those who had invested so much energy in them.

 

I know that some people (including some good friends) enjoy life under lockdown and who have felt at last validated in their own preference for solitude and a more solitary lifestyle by it. 

 

I have felt irritated though when I hear what I identify as a trend for over-positivity and platitudinous advice given with a kind of hysterical desperation to convince us that it is ‘alright really’, great even, and if we could all only be as motivated, creative and busy, it would be fine. Perhaps it’s a fear that the acknowledgement that everything is far from fine would bring the dreadfulness of it all tumbling down and the only thing to do is create this ridiculous façade of desperate over-positivity.  I guess I’m trying to embrace  the dualism that I am OK and that the current situation is shit,  that I am managing well, while also feeling a great sense of sadness and loss -  both positions are true at once for me.

 

Blindness

This blog is about blindness, its meanings reflected through my day to day experience. While I remain in control of certain aspects of my life, where the lockdown is hitting me hardest, is through the putting on hold of those that I am no longer in control of. I feel like the contraction of my world and associated loss of my independence has deflated me, has left me with a sense of having had to give up on the very things that I’ve striven all my life to work for and hold onto.

 

As I’ve described in detail here in earlier posts, I shop, but not in the way that I have been used to doing and enjoyed, I walk about my neighbourhood, but with a level of stress and massive eye-strain through trying to take responsibility for my part in social distancing that loses much of the enjoyment. I use video conferencing platforms with the continual knowledge of being seen but not able to see, not knowing if my camera is lined up properly, not seeing what others are looking like/wearing, signalling. I am aware that sighted people always have more and faster access, want to fling photos, screenshot’s or visual jokes  around, the chat on messaging groups often goes faster than I can manage to keep up with responding to. If it were possible, it feels like the world is becoming more and more visual and the preferences of the many inevitably impact badly on the needs of the few. I am exhausted with trying to keep up.