Like the grieving ones left behind after bereavement, life will never be the same after corona virus. There cannot be a return to how things used to be. We are being forced into a position of negotiation and of navigation- our "new normal". New deals must be struck, new balances checked, new positions considered. As has been pithily but accurately stated before (including by me) you cannot skirt around grief, you have to go through it. And if you have to go through it then the primary skill you learn very quickly is that of navigation. This is what many of us now have to do- navigate this new territory.
What line shall we choose? Do you tip-toe with anxious but delicate precision on your new path or do you race onwards aimed at the horizon? Does every new social interaction carry equal weight of consideration or can you rely on reactivity over reflection? Each day, week, month, what matters? What matters to me? To others?
If there is a silver lining to this corona-cloud it may be that some of us can learn to connect with increased sensitivity to the needs of others. To empathise well, mental health professionals must not only imagine themselves in someone else's situation but must also practice imagining the emotions of the other person in their own position. One method to increase empathy, that anyone can do, is to identify a time you may have felt similarly to the other person, although not necesarily the same (they might be grieving a relative, you may have lost a much-loved pet, for example) and extrapolate from there, increasing and deliberately complicating your potential feelings. We would do well to use this current time of disconnection and of loneliness to extrapolate from those emotions which will help us empathise with others who have experienced loss, depression, anxiety and other mental health issues that affect most of us at some time in their lives. You may not know the grief I feel after losing my daughter seven years ago, for example, but you may know how it feels to be unable to communicate freely with friends and loved ones, how it feels to be unable to go out, how it feels to be less useful and productive than usual, and so on.
I have read that soldiers on the front line of war can simultaneously feel boredom and horror. To experience long periods of nothing at the same time as thoughts of impending annilation raise levels of a anxiety and hyper-vigilance, a sense of continual alertness. I have experienced a similar dichotomy over the last four months- a persistent stillness (where what happens next is that nothing happens) at same time as thoughts of fear and chaos. This is due to a combined lack of professional productivity (I am, as a community-based nurse, working from home during these times but I am combining this with home-schooling my son) and of waiting for Covid-19 to directly affect me and those I love. I have also started a new part-time career as a bicycle mechanic with all the concerns this causes- primarily, will I get customers and will their bikes be safely fixed.
A persistently raised level of anxiety with little respite, and the feeling that "something is just about to happen", is emotionaly exhausting. A recognition of these simultaneous emotions- that there is nothing there and that there might be something awful there too- can break that cycle so we can distance ourselves, using reason and facts, from the destructive effects of hyper-vigilance. If we say "I know I am doing this, I know why I am doing this" we gain greater control of the related emotions and often see a reduction in our anxiety and stress.
For me there are pramatic considerations too. How alone do I want to be? How will my job look now, as a community nurse? How will I get to see my family in England? How will my son's schooling work? What about shopping? Going out for walks? For runs?
I am neither gregarious nor particularly sociable. I am a good listener, a useful quality as a mental health nurse and fine for one-to-one meetings with friends, but I get over-awed easily in a group and can be too sensitive to noise and voices. Most people don't have to think too hard about their friendships, it is easy and "natural" to them, they "just do it" but I feel very different. I have to put in great effort to make friends (although I am usually glad when I have them) and to keep them. But this means, for the future, navigating another new channel- relationships. What sort of friend do I want to be now? What friends do I want now? I may feel as if I have to start all over again with old friendships. Do I want to? What do I get out of my friendships and what do my friends get out of being friends with me?
I am 47 and I have been working in the area of mental health for 25 years. I am not a good nurse but I am skilled in this specialist area. I have improved, and saved, many lives through psychological and social interventions, I am confident in my abilities and have a broad range of professional experiences having worked in the NHS, in charities, in different cities, different teams, in different sectors varying from psychiatric intensive care inpatient settings to community-based teams with homeless people who have complex needs. But I want to be a bicycle mechanic.
I am not really sure how this happened. My dad reminds me that, when I was a teenager, I told him I wanted a life of two careers, changing my job in my 40's, but the truth is that I don't want to get old knowing that I have other passions that were not professionally fulfilled. I love bicycles and I have slowly been pulled towards them over the years with increasing strength, culminating in a (for me, huge, leaping) move to train as a bike mechanic early this year with a direct wish for a career change. This has coincided with the existence of covid-19 and the world's new love of cycling. I am not fatalist but if I was I would assume a lack of coincidence here.
So, a new navigation- what do I want my job to be from now on? How strong is the pull away from my career of decades, the one which I know, which I am good at, the one that would, on days I am confident, be worse off without me? How strong is the pull towards my career as a mechanic? How strongly do I believe all the wisdom shared by people on their death-bed, sharing their reflections on their lives, who very frequently regret working too much for too long in a job they didn't love, who regret not following their heart's wishes when they were young?
There will be no return to how things were. So what do we do?
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