A STORY ABOUT COVID-21

Another night of not sleeping.

Another night of worrying.

Another night where I’m afraid of what tomorrow brings.

I’m so tired.

Drained.

Broken.

I feel like I haven’t slept for three days, have non-stop headaches, and this latest curfew announcement has lowered my spirits even lower. The closing of playgrounds was just a foul cherry on top.

I don’t want to talk about COVID anymore. I’m sure you’re sick of it too.

So, I apologise in advance if this is the last thing you want to read. Trust me, it’s the last thing I want to write. But I can’t sleep, am supposedly a writer, so thought a quiet vent might help anyone else reading this feel a sense of “You’re not alone”.

Every day it’s a new grim prognostication. I feel so much for all those people who have had their business crushed, their spirits broken, and their life-long dreams taken away through no fault of their own.

I know my family and I are probably doing better than the majority. I am still able to get some good work, have set up a new business, and from the outside things look pretty good. But below that surface, the constant bombardment is taking its toll.

Because COVID is all anyone talks about. When people talk about it, I try to zone out and just wait for the ensuing doom-laden conversation to run its course.

Yet, no matter how much I try to avoid something I have absolutely no control over, it’s always there, tap, tap, tapping into my skull.

I see stats that show suicide hasn’t gone up. That’s good.

But that shouldn’t be the final, be-all and end-all measure of mental health.

Rather, it’s the thought of suicide that I believe to be silently stalking across Victoria. And having spoken to a number of youth mental health charities over the last few weeks as part of my new business Silver Lining, they all say that calls to helplines are at all-time highs.

Whenever a new lockdown is announced or is extended, or some new edict is passed across our children, Sheri and I have to console our eleven-year-old son, Roarke, in tears for the umpteenth time over the last few years.

Roarke loves sport. It’s not only the physical act and team-oriented part of it that he loves, but it’s his real social connector. He LIVES for it.

But, that’s all gone.

He was so pumped to compete in the Victorian Short Course Swimming championships a few weeks, ago, and then three days before he was due to compete it was pulled.

The tears flowed and flowed and flowed.

Just devastating.

We worry that he’ll start to have an attitude of, “If I work hard to achieve something, isn’t it just going to be taken away? It’s already happened a dozen times in the last year, so, is there a real point in setting goals?” So, what’s going to happen with this generation of kids in the future? How can they plan for anything?

Now, I know at this point some people will say “Well, you’ll be surprised at how resilient kids are! They’ll bounce back in no time!”

Well, I’m calling bullshit on that.

Because I think back to my childhood and still carry many, many scars from that time that still affect me every day of my adult life. I haven’t got over them. I haven’t bounced back. I go to some really fucking dark places often. No amount of counselling, medication, meditation, mindfulness, breathing, self-help books or podcasts can totally quell those feelings of inadequacy and pain that I carry with me. And all of these lockdowns are sending me back to places that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

I may not attempt suicide, but I sure as shit am thinking of it more often. And that’s not a stat that will show up anywhere.

This only makes me worry more about Roarke’s headspace more for today, and for his future, as he is so like me it’s scary.

When things were at their peak of lockdown this year, we knew he needed some psychological help from a counsellor.

The answer was always along the lines of, “We aren’t taking new patients.” Or, “You’ll have to go on a waiting list for two years.” Or, “Have you tried (insert practice)?”

I rang twenty different practices and could not get a fully qualified psychologist to help him to navigate the challenge we call Life.

Thankfully, the 21st call was successful, and we were able to find a trainee counsellor to help. Even still, that was after a four-month wait. She’s really helping him, but sheesh it’s a long road.

As part of trying to help him and the rest of our family, we knew we had to make a change.

So, when our landlord decided to try and cash in on the booming property market in Kew and gave us notice (at least rich people are getting richer!), Sheri and I decided to change everything, and move out of the city down to the Mornington Peninsula.

We pulled both Roarke and his sister Lila out of school, and chose to homeschool them the rest of the year, rather than creating yet more hideous disruption of going into school, going back into lockdown, in and out, in and out, in and out, ad nauseam. The home-learning we do now never involves a Zoom call. It’s just a human connection… together.

We already know screen time is detrimental to humans, yet we subjected our kids to six hours a day of it for 18 months.

How can we say, “get off a screen” when they are now addicted to it? It’s like giving someone free crack for a month and then wondering why they are now desperate for that next hit!

In our family, screen time has another profound effect on our Lila.

Last year she was doing a Zoom class.

We watched as she tried to listen in to a teacher, and then what the other kids were saying, and also attempt to participate.

Over the course of five minutes, all the colour drained from her face. She turned grey, got a splitting headache, and then had to lay in bed for two days.

If you know Lila, then you know sitting still is not something she ever does. The Zoom calls were bringing on Epileptic episodes in her.

So, she had to stop doing remote school from then on. We tried the best we could to try and stay up the school curriculum, but looking back we did a pretty appalling job. We couldn’t get an exemption for her to attend school in person even though our doctor sent a letter recommending as such to the Victorian Government. But we were advised by The Powers That Be that because neither myself or Sheri were “essential” workers, and she was in no danger at home, that she just had to stay at home.

Another by-product of lockdown that doesn’t show up on a statistic.

We are so driven by looking at numbers, that we are no longer looking at the things that can’t be measured.

Because the beauty in life is never in the black and white. It’s in the grey.

But, sadly, the grey that we are all experiencing at the moment is not of the beautiful kind.

This grey is overwhelming.

This grey is everywhere.

This grey feels like it will never end.

I don’t have any answers. That much is clear. All I’m doing is searching around, fumbling in the grey.

Because that’s all any of us can do.

That search for truth and hope is a very human trait. And I know I feel less like a human than I ever have before.

So, please. Be kind to your fellow humans. Don’t point fingers. Don’t berate anyone. Show some love. Give a hug to anyone you’re allowed to. And try and get some sleep for goodness sake! I’ll try and do that. But, please don’t be too hard on me in the very likely event that I fail. I don’t think I can take much more. I’m just trying to do my best.

Love to all.

:)