The reason I haven’t written many posts recently is because I feels callous to write about anything other than Armaggedon. Musings on my rather privileged and boring lock-down seem in bad taste, given the current state of the world and the fact that lots of people are having a really awful time. Even though psychologists and great thinkers suggest that we retreat into our smaller interior worlds to help us cope with waves of bad news, I still feel guilty about scrolling through Kardashian lock-down fashion and fixating on peoples’ interior design choices at Zoom meetings. There is a sense amoungst us that we shouldn’t be enjoying life when there are big bad serious things happening.

Guilt and Shame are big power players in the pandemic. On a day to day basis I can generally identify about 6 things that I am ashamed of including: being able to work, sitting on a park bench for 5 minutes, not spending time with my children, scoring ‘appallingly’ in an imaginary Ofsted inspection of home school, not volunteering for the NHS and being fit and healthy. These are the main ones, but I haven’t even touched the shame of slightly fancying the Chancellor Rishi and looking up his personal details on Wikipedia, during his delivery of the ‘daily update of doom’ at Number 10.

During lock-down, we are not only harder on ourselves but everyone around us, casting judgement and scoring people for their ability to social distance. Every time I get back from the supermarket, I get corona-rage about my ‘two metre’ space being invaded and rant about how I am going to get a megaphone and disgrace people for not following the ‘very simple’ rules. Later, I invariably feel guilty for my corona-rage because you don’t know everyone’s situation and it’s not very nice to be so judgemental. From local reports of nasty notes on cars, blocking off public footpaths and vandalism, it would seem that the general public have also got massive corona-rage and feel that it is their duty to shame the public, judging them for their lock-down failures.

I was considering how I could look after my friends when they are going through a really hard time; I try to treat them gently, listen to them, take them chocolate and hold their hands. Given that lock-down is a very hard time (and much harder for others) it seems totally bizarre that we are treating ourselves and our fellow humans with such harshness. It’s natural to want to assign blame for this grim situation and since we can’t actually shout at the Coronavirus itself (well we can if you want), we tend to be angry with ourselves and others instead. Maybe if we could be a little more aware of this behaviour, we will feel a bit better. Similarly we need to remind ourselves that it’s absolutely ok to laugh at Jo Exotic home haircuts, have some nice times during lockdown and not so feel guilty about our own ‘perceived’ failures.

Go easy on yourselves,

Sophie xoxo