Tag: coronavirus

Thoughts

Maybe I need interaction after all?

minceandskirlie

This is weird. This… Everything. Nothing is normal now. I thought I was doing OK with that but now I’m not so sure.

Last week I beat the lockdown by a day and started self-isolating with my family after I developed a persistent cough. By the middle of the week I was shivery (though had no fever) and felt quite ill, then a few days later I needed two or three naps just to get through the day due to fatigue. Was it COVID-19? Who knows? I might never find out.

I started feeling a little better over the weekend and even had enough energy to record a bit of mandolin for my own contribution to the #COVIDCeilidh hashtag on Twitter:

I told myself I’d try and pick up music and writing again to help me get through this and so far I’ve been pretty good at finding time here and there to pick up my mandolin or a guitar. I’ve loved getting to know pieces of music again that I’ve not played for years and even started working on a few new tunes. But to be honest it’s a thumb in the dyke of my anxiety just now.

The biggest problem I have is working from home. I thought I would really enjoy it, getting to look into my garden all day and watch the birds (and that has been great), go for a run around Stonehaven at lunchtimes, get to see more of the kids. The surprise to me though, as someone who is very much an introvert, is how much I miss the office environment. There’s a constant level of interaction which I find completely lacking now and no amount of Skype texts is making up for it.

For two days now I’ve been sat on my own in our spare room listening to my kids playing and arguing elsewhere in the house while I pick up tickets from my team’s queue, email users and fix problems. All without actually speaking to anyone. Suddenly I feel really distant and it’s hitting my anxiety hard.

Hopefully it passes. This is all new for everyone and I think it will take time for us to adapt. I have an online games session arranged with some friends over the weekend which might help. Plus, now I’m over my illness I should be able to get out running again and that should calm my mind down a lot as well. Failing that I’ll try more music or maybe I’ll start talking to the birds in the garden as though they’re my office colleagues.

Thoughts

Strange and Scary Times

minceandskirlie

It’s been a year since I posted anything on this blog. It’s probably been more than a year since I finished a piece of creative writing. I started studying with the Open University for a degree in Environmental Science last year and between that, work and my family responsibilities I haven’t had much time for being creative.

But I have really missed that outlet over the last few weeks. I sat watching the COVID-19 pandemic spiral out of control, encompassing Asia, then Italy and now most of the world. At first I felt OK. My thinking was we just have to follow the advice and the rest is out of our hands (personally speaking at least). I was able to detach myself from it and it didn’t affect me.

That’s not the case now.

My day job is in IT and as the department started to move from our normal day to day work towards enabling the business to work remotely in its entirety, a familiar old feeling started to return. I suffered from general anxiety disorder for a prolonged period some years ago but had felt like I was getting a lot of my old confidence back in the last 6-12 months. Then this week, as I was packing up my stuff to take home so I could work from my spare room for the foreseeable future, as I contemplated that my kids wouldn’t be going to nursery for the next few months and my eldest might miss the start of her primary school journey after the summer, as businesses both local and national suffered the sudden loss of most of their custom, I started feeling scared again.

Now to be honest it’s an understandable response and I imagine lots of us are scared at the moment. I’m hopeful that this isn’t a full blown return of my anxiety problems and just a natural reaction to an unprecedented situation, but only time will tell.

But it has highlighted to me that I spent too much time doing things which are unhelpful for my mental health. I can keep informed on the pandemic without constantly monitoring the BBC and Guardian’s live updates pages. I don’t need to sit on twitter all night watching everyone react in horror at the raving inadequacies of our government and Prime Minister. I can do something else instead.

I still need to spend a large chunk of my free time studying, though my current module will finish soon and I’ll be free for the summer. But I don’t have to fill the rest of my time battering my mental health when I’ve got enough on my plate with work, the kids and my degree. So I’m going to try and start switching off the laptop and getting back into some writing and playing music.

Hopefully I can get back into the mindset to write some poetry again, but to start with I think I’ll start keeping this blog updated some more and dig out my to do list of songs and tunes that I was working on before other commitments took hold. If I feel like sharing I’ll post some of it on here.

In the meantime everyone needs to look after themselves, their families and their community.

Stay healthy in body and mind.