After days of build-up, many of us were waiting to see whether the Prime Minister’s televised briefing would add anything new to restrictions announced previously across England, including pubs and restaurants closing at 10pm, and the rule of no more than six people gathering. While the briefing was more of a reinforcement of the measures being implemented, Boris Johnson did warn that stricter restrictions could be considered if people did not follow the rules.
Not a single person has been unaffected by the impact of coronavirus, but as someone who is living alone, I have deep reservations about restrictions being in place for up to six months, and the possibility that they may get stricter. Quite honestly, I don’t know how my mental health is going to cope – and for someone who likes to be alone, has spent copious amounts of time on my own willingly, this is a big deal. More than 10 million Brits were already living under some form of local restrictions – I’d imagine those living alone may feel the same.
When lockdown measures were first implemented six months ago, I had a lot of people ask me if I was alright. They made comments like: “we feel really bad for you that you’re doing this on your own.” I told them not to feel bad for me, and in truth, I actually found the first three months of it fairly alright. Any stress that came would have been stressful to other people too – such as finding the supermarkets bare, worrying about loved ones, and realising the Government was not prepared in any shape or form to deal with a pandemic.
As someone who had a bit of paid work and didn’t have elderly relatives in a nursing home, I recognised that I was lucky. I had weekly Zoom calls with groups of friends and I spoke to my family every day on the phone. While we associate people being alone with loneliness, I knew that loneliness is actually about the lack of meaningful interaction with people who know you, so I made sure I kept on top of this during this time.
But it was clear during these three months that people isolating on their own were completely forgotten by the Government, and were not factored into measures around coronavirus if they weren’t shielding. I learned this the hard way after contracting coronavirus in March.
I had terrible fatigue, laboured breathing, nausea and I had lost my sense of taste and smell, but at the time testing wasn’t available or open to people who weren’t key workers or ill enough to be admitted to hospital. There were many weeks of not knowing what was wrong, suspecting it was coronavirus, but having to manage all of it alone – the mental toll of worrying about my health, juggling work and basic tasks like making sure there was food in the house.
Rightfully, all the resources were aimed at people who needed it the most, but it didn’t mitigate the impact on people like me who had ‘mild’ Covid – even if it didn’t feel mild whatsoever – and had to muddle through it alone.
I truly understood the Government had not factored us in when I was told the only way I could get medical help is if I could drive to a ‘hot clinic’. I don’t have a car, I wasn’t well enough to drive even if I did, and I was isolating on my own.
Even when measures were being loosened in June, until support bubbles were introduced, they were all based around households and families. And even when support bubbles were announced, they left out people isolating on their own. “So hang on,” I said to a friend of mine, “if your support bubble is another household with several people in it, and the only person they can then socialise with is you, what’s the incentive for them?”
What hit hardest for me wasn’t actually isolating on my own; it was realising that after following the rules and paying your taxes, we weren’t even a consideration in the strategy. And when we were mentioned, it was in salacious headlines like ‘SEX BAN FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T LIVE TOGETHER’ reducing people living on their own to desperate shaggers rather than people with the same concerns as other families.
Despite all of that, the first months of lockdown had been just about bearable, and during summer being able to socialise with friends outdoors and businesses opening back up resurrected some semblance of normality. As someone who works in the mental health space, I also tried to make sure I was maintaining good mental health hygiene, from getting enough sleep to seeking support when necessary.
But with coronavirus cases increasing, in the last few days I’ve realised that I haven’t quite recovered from the low-level anxiety that has been building up over the last month or so. There is also a sense of déjà vu that reignites old worries given that loo roll and canned foods are being stocked up by some shoppers again, our government insists we’ve done a great job with Covid despite having one of the highest death tolls in the world, and there is still not a clear sense of what’s happening with systems such as track and trace.
While all of this might sound like sour grapes towards people who are in families or who spent lockdown with friends and loved ones, it really isn’t. Despite six months of the most reduced contact I’ve had in my entire life, I love living alone, and faced with the prospect of living with other people, would still choose to do so.
Yet it is painfully obvious that an extended period of stricter lockdown measures will be extremely hard to manage alone – but if the Government got better at being more consistent in its messaging, and more importantly being more inclusive in measures that it introduces, maybe it wouldn’t need to be.
At the moment, it feels like a significant number of us are left to figure this out solo. My stance will be to learn from the lessons of the first lockdown and stop expecting the Government to provide a solution or remember that we exist. While that might sound incredibly bleak, it does offer some measure of control knowing that clear, decisive strategy is not going to be forthcoming, so making those decisions for ourselves in a law-abiding way is the only way of navigating through this next phase with our sanity intact.
