I don’t feel out of pocket saying no one foresaw what would become of humanity in 2020. Not Miss Cleo, not Mystic Meg and definitely not the people running the show. I look back now at photos and videos from before the pandemic and I look at them with a sense of nostalgia for a time long past, but then I see the time stamp and it’s ‘January 2020’. Somehow that last 10 months have passed with excruciating stagnation while simultaneously at warp speed. Time is a funny thing.
Where do I even begin?
It’s no secret that I have spent the majority of the past twelve months shielding at the request of Boris and his people. Since March 17th 2020 I have pretty much been in my house. I briefly went back to work in September but by November 3rd I was back indoors and haven’t left since, except for hospital appointments. It’s given me a lot of time to think about life and assess things, for which I’m grateful for.
There’s no doubt in my mind I’ve dealt with this situation with more ease than most. I am very much an introvert so spending months isolated in my house is pretty much what I was built for, so it’s definitely been my time to shine. That’s not to say I haven’t missed my friends and my family, of course I have - I’m not a monster. However, I’ve seen and heard people struggling and not from the life impacts such as health, finance, mental illness etc… but because they can’t deal with being alone or separated from people.
Admittedly I had a really low point during the BLM protests. The whole situation was… I can’t even find the right words to express what it was. ‘Sad’ doesn’t cover it, the magnitude let alone emotion. The fact I was in my house with very little to do made me think about it over and over and it put me in a very dark place. I sought help from a mental health professional though and was able to work through certain things but it didn’t change the fact that even during a global pandemic that is killing people en mass without any prejudice, a black man can get killed in the street by police. This is the world we live in. It was also deeply frustrating that I wasn’t able to participate in any of the protests as I was shielding. I felt like I wasn’t being supportive enough. Like a lot of people I didn’t know where to direct that energy. The anger, the sadness, the powerlessness…
And don’t even get me started on the US elections.
Or Brexit.
Or conspiracy theorists.
Or anti-vaxers.
Humanity really exposed its ass in 2020. The good parts but mostly the bad. Like a rat cornered by a rat catcher, humanity was like “Fuck it, we got nothing to lose!” And laid it all bare. The problem with laying shit bare is it exposes so much ugly. So much selfishness, so much acrimony, so much enmity.
“Why should I wear a mask?”
"More toilet roll!"
“Why should I have to stay in my house?”
“I’m healthy”
“People die all the time, why should this be any different?”
“The government are out to get us with this vaccine.”
“Election fraud!”
“There are the haves and there are the have nots, that’s just life.”
“All Lives Matter.”
“But he was a criminal”
“Fake news”
Is it a coincidence that after a year that has separated many and encouraged them to spend time alone that so many have formed these very selfish sentiments? Who knows. I suspect there may be some correlation between the two though.
Now we are just over one week in to 2021 and it’s almost like deja vu. It’s like when you watch a TV show and it says “Previously on…” and they do a recap, the first 7 days of 2021 was the recap. “Previously on The World We Live In…” And the storming of the Capitol just established the plot arc for this season.
Stay tuned.