I’ve never enjoyed being busy. I’ve never enjoyed wasted time. I’ve never enjoyed following other people’s agenda. So this lockdown should be perfect, right? Apart from all the people dying, out there, in the world.
‘People ask me if I’m bored yet,’ I said to my friend by text. She never gets asked that because she’s a mother and a wife and runs a household and works full-time even now during this new normal. ‘I never get bored,’ I said. ‘Except when you’re around other people,’ she said. ‘LOL!’ I said, ‘That’s so true.’ Because it is. Sometimes I find other people very boring. I probably shouldn’t say that but I lack social graces anyway. I’ve always been comfortable being by myself, just pottering about.
The first two or three weeks were sort of idyllic. I napped, I went for walks in the parks around our neighbourhood, I made small progress on my illustration course, I darned socks, I hung out occasionally with my new flatmates, I wrote and illustrated a small book for my nibling’s birthday, I talked to my friends and family via Facetime, via Zoom, via the phone – more often than I talk to them in the old normal. Suddenly there was space, space to be, space to think, space to consider and obsess. My freelance work dropped off entirely and I only have my regular part-time job, 20 hours a week – enough to pay my bills and not much more. But then what else is there to spend it on in lockdown.
I loved the silence. The quiet in the walks – where the only noise was the birds and the occasional car or delivery van or bus devoid of passengers. Nothing but my head to entertain me – my head, the trees, the birds. It was bliss. I investigated Buddhism, maybe I could move into a Buddhist nunnery in in Japan – somewhere silent and contemplative, somewhere beautiful. But then I was never that keen on Buddhism – somehow it’s always felt too much like a denial of real life and I’m already that way inclined, real life is emotional and messy. It should be.
Silence and slowness suits me. I’m easily overwhelmed – too much light, too much noise, too many people, too much of one person, too much talking, too many text messages, too many emails, too much emotion. There are some things I can’t have too much of – stars and trees and birds. They don’t ask anything of me. Sometimes asking anything of me is too much, even if it’s very little. Can you tell I suffer from depression?
I’ve never told anyone about this. But somehow all that space allowed it, allowed me to think about it. I went for a walk and I thought about it. I try not to do that, I think we all do, we occupy ourselves so we don’t have the space, or we drink, or we do drugs, or we work, or we take up obsessive hobbies. I’m not afraid of thinking about it anymore, I’m less afraid than I used to be – less afraid every year. I don’t think about it very often but I’ve never forgotten it. It’s always there like something down in the basement that you never take out and look at but sometimes you stumble across. I still don’t know what to think about it. Or maybe I should say, what to feel about it. I know how I feel about it when it happens to other people. Really fucking angry. Why can’t I feel angry about it for myself? It’s easier to feel like it’s black and white for other people.
I don’t know if it’s why I have so much trouble connecting to people – emotionally, sexually. Can one incident in a childhood really have so much impact? Or is it really a collection of things. I was an unpopular kid at primary school, I was bullied. That probably made me more wary of people, too. Have you noticed what I’m not saying – what “it” is? I guess you figured it out though. I’m still not sure. I know what it is, but it’s easier not to be sure. I didn’t know what was happening. That’s the thing, if you don’t know what’s happening then it doesn’t feel like it’s something bad. How old was I then – eight, nine, ten? I don’t remember it hurting. It must have hurt though, right? Sometimes I wonder if I misremembered, but I know I didn’t. Why would I have remembered if I didn’t know it was bad? Did I know it was bad? I knew not to talk about it. How did I know that?
I did tell someone once. But they didn’t believe me. Maybe I didn’t explain it properly. I know that’s wrong. I think it’s because they didn’t care, I think it’s because they weren’t the right person to tell, I think it’s because they didn’t want to hear. I feel angry about that. I feel able to be angry about that.
I don’t know if I can even recognise my own trauma. I don’t know if I really understand whether or how or how much it fucked me up. Of course it was wrong. Of course it was.
It’s good to have space. Space lets us think about things. It’s good to think about things. Isn’t it? Is it?
The weeks after that? The weeks after that, I’ve struggled a little but there are many distractions. And after all, I’m one of the lucky ones, still alive.