COVID, Isolation and Mental Illness
The brutal trifecta of 2020.
2020 started as innocuous as any other year. I was on the upward trend in almost all aspects of my life. I was living my best life, and then March happened. When the lockdown started in mid-March, I was actually enthusiastic about it. Hell, I have been a shut in almost my entire life. I felt like this will be a walk in the park. I thought to myself that I was going to get more writing done, but I did not. Instead, I obsessed with the barrage of news from terrorist attacks in Afghanistan to the nearly hourly “breaking news” alerts from CNN. I got nothing done and only delved into a pattern of mental destruction and despair. I have not written in ages, minus my Twitter ramblings since the start of this global nightmare.
A year ago I deleted my Facebook. At the time as it was years before then, I felt watching my friends and family constantly posting about the “good times” they were having was doing me more harm than good. I felt like, why am I not living that life. Last year when I did that, I felt safe. I knew that I could get on a plane and visit my moms. It was kind of a security blanket. No matter if I lived 10 miles or 3000 miles away, that security blanket was always there. And then that security blanket slowly faded away. A lockdown that was supposed to last for a couple of weeks now seemed it would never end, and it hasn’t.
The COVID nightmare plays on
The thing about this global nightmare is that hundreds of thousands of people are dying but they are dying out of sight and out of mind. This is one of those pandemic where unless your loved one is dying or is seriously sick, this pandemic does not exist. No one is talking about this. We see the graphics on CNN, FOX or MSNBC but there is a significant populace, at least in the US, they see it as a partisan issue. I wonder, at times, during the the bubonic plague, when people were coughing up their lungs, did liberalism or conservatism play any role?
This nightmare will not end unless we treat this pandemic as a “God damn” pandemic. This pandemic may not be as lethal as the bubonic plague or we may not be seeing people coughing up their lungs in the streets but the affects of this pandemic is fucking with us in ways, I think most of us are not apt to deal with.
COVID is Effin with my “God Damn” mental being
I started this essay with how great I was doing in January of 2020. You know, the forever times. Those times when we listened to the troll and we just made fun of the troll. We were scared as fuck because we thought he was going to start a war with North Korea or Iran. Weird, because those threats were not threats at all. Who knew that the president of the US would be pen pals with the dictator of North Korea. Who knew? But I digress.
A lot of us are hoping that when when we turn the calendar on December 31st, all of our problems will cease to exist. It will not.
Getting Real
This part of this essay, I have been suffering with. A lot of people are suffering and the outlets that people have to address the hardships vary. Over the last few months, I have to deal with a roommate who tried to kill himself. He was suffering. As much as I have had to deal with with being 3000 miles away from the closet loved one, I, at least, had the ability to dial a few numbers and he did not.
