Corona- A New Navigation

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? 

Trees that we are

We have been through the worst but here we are.
Remaining unwavering and radiant, the object of envy,
we have been through the best and here we are-
trees, standing apart but under the same swaying canopy.
Our roots have grown coupled,
exchanging and sustaining, our tendrils bound
but separate. Breathing ethers,
swapping nutrients underground.
We warn each other of insect attacks and burrowing grubs,
of sharp beaks and drought.
Of fallow times and fires and of shelters built by Scouts,
and of fallen neighbours' weight.
Seasons change, time will pass, everything will pass,
but not you.
My youth and my buds, the seeds I should miss,
but I don't, for you.

As storms whip and bend inflexible friends,
and peeling bark and cracking branches drop to the forest floor,
as every shade of green swirls and circles,
we are tethered to each other, to the earth, moored.
It takes fellows to make a tree grow, they say,
no tree flowers alone, they say,
a tree breathes and shares and signals, they say.
Its rips and traumas reinforce and reassure
its solidity and its mass and its yielding
heft that surrenders to being weathered
and fatigued but remains cathedral in stature,
a sanctuary, a shelter, protection.

We bloom and we thrive together,
our wellspring mingling,
unsingling, united. Being
impermanent, fated to decay,
means we foster our growth,
and create our future.
I now know how to think,
with you I am home.

Loneliness in times of Covid-19

I regularly remind myself how privileged I am. Almost daily I thank pure, simple luck- because meritocracy has very little to do with it- that I am healthy, have clean water, available food and a roof over my head. I also thank pure, simple luck that I have advantages as a middle-aged, white, male. I am very aware of the entitlements this affords me and try to use my position to help others when I can.
But these are comparisons with other people. And they can be shallow. My experience is my experience and my subjective feelings are deep and affecting. Irrresepctive of my luck at having food or shelter or clean water, if I am lonely then I am lonely, if I am sad then I am sad. And the experience of others doesn't come into it. I am also astutely aware, from personal as well as evidence-based professional experience, that having had previous mental health issues such as traumatic grief or social anxiety would place me at higher risk of feeling lonely and isolated and at increased risk of those mental health issues returning.
I have felt lonely, on and off, for much of my life. This has occasionally dovetailed into bouts of depression. I have had friends of course and have not spent much time alone although I have always enjoyed my own company- many years playing alone with Lego as my personality was growing as a child meant that my own company holds no fear for me, I enjoy being by myself. But lonliness is different.
Loneliness is an emotional disconnection from others as oppossed to being alone, the physical distancing from others. We can feel lonely even when we are around other people (my life-long Achilles heal), even around the people we are supposed to feel closest to and most supported by. We can feel lonely in a crowd, at work, when sitting at the dinner table with our loved and loving family and among our closest friends.
This is how the Corona virus lockdown has affected me so far- the loneliness. I can manage not seeing adults for days at a time, I can manage (with difficulty) being away from feeling useful at work, I can manage (also with some difficulty and not without guilt) "working" from home and feeling professionally unproductive, I can manage most new stressors that the lockdown proves to me.
But the disconnectedness I feel is not the distancing I am in control of. It has not been my choice to create space in my relationships, it isn't my choice to stand metres away from strangers and act as if a deadly virus is present in the very air surrounding them, it isn't my choice to stop hugging my friends. The forced imposition, reinforced with vague ideas of being a pariah, have echoes of when Ruby died nearly seven years ago (few people really understand how it feels to lose their child hence the feelings of being an outcast)- the social isolaton and the disconnect was strong and deep, then as it is now. At that time, as now, there was a persistent feeling that nothing is happening but that something is about to happen (and never does). Like soldiers in a trench I waited, and I wait, and nothing happens. I don't really know what I am waiting for but I know I need to wait- what else am I going to do?
To feel lonely is to feel a particularly odd type of "aloneness". To feel on your own when you are walking among crowds of people or when you are chatting over dinner with your family or when you are at the office, talking to colleagues and working through problems, has an inhuman air, an unfamiliarity with normal human interaction. There is not only psychic space between you and others but also the feeling that you are not of their kind, that your language is different, that your history and culture cannot be understood, that although your planet is shared you are an alien. Feeling lonely is not to feel misunderstood but to feel that you cannot be understood.
I am busy all day, every day. I am home-schooling my son which, according to other parents, takes between no time at all because their children refuse to be any part of it and many hours a day. Tom and I spend up to five hours a day on this, including breaks and play. In the afternoon we usually include, at Tom's insistence, a walk of eight to twelve kilometeres along the sea or around the surrounding streets and hills. In between Tom's schooling I fit in work emails and phone calls and I attend my office each Friday for an unrelentingly busy day assisting people in crisis after crisis. Also during the day, and some evenings, I try to focus on some bicycle repair work (I recently reached an ambition of qualifying as a bicycle mechanic and was trying to drum up work before the virus hit. My yearly plan, such as it is, was to be a mechanic working from home part-time and also work part-time as a nurse, my career of over twenty years). Claire, my wife, works full-time as the manager of a local Community Mental Health Team for the NHS and she works late every day, every week. There are relatives and friends to keep and eye on, our weekends are precious and we fill them with time together.
I have almost no time to myself. This contributes to feeling lonely, as I am sure it would for many people with little space for themselves, in a similar way to feelings of loneliness resulting from being alone and without company. So what am I to do?

I am formulating a plan. To help reduce my lonliness I will try to:

-Have more time to myself but, crucially, at my control to do as I wish. In all honesty this will probably involve simply sitting around reading a book but that's OK too- that's my decision, that's my book, that's me being in control of my actions.
-Cycle and run regularly. For many parents, the "lockdown" isn't the free time to catch up on box sets and piles of books that some other people are doing- there simply isn't time- and I am not cycling on my commute as I used to three days a week. I need to set time aside to do this (I jumped out of bed early today to get in a cycling sprint before Claire needed to leave for work).
-Read more.
-Focus on letting go of things that are out of my control.Considering my profession and the years of experience I have working in the mental health field I would often consider the profound importance of recognising what is, and isn't, in our individual control. To disregard our chains and to master autonomy is one key to a good life.
-Keep an eye on problems I have had in the past- grief, depression, social anxiety- and make some changes to my thoughts and behaviours if needs be.
-Regularly remind myself, until I believe it, that I am contributing to Tom's education and development and that being a teacher to him here at home is, in a tangible sense, instrumental to the shortening of this crisis. It is common to feel that we do not contribute during a crisis, whether relating to Corona virus, a car accident, ill-heath or otherwise, but on closer inspection this is often far from the truth. The most useful people to have around you when in crisis- and through my work I have seen numerous overdoses, victims of violence, cardiac arrests and potentially traumatic crises- are the least dramatic people, those who stop, think and act (instead of reacting in the immediate) and people whose behaviour is guided by reason and evidence, not Facebook or wilful ignorance and superstition. Those quiet, calm people standing to one side without interuption, the ones who wait for you to catch their eye for assistance and who keep peripheral stimulus to a minimum, the ones who calm the neighbours- they are the ones you want by your side. I have to regularly remind myself that to keep Tom educated, calm, stimulated and secure is pragmatic and most helpful for him and others.


If I was a slightly different person, or in different social circumstances, I might also:

-Mention how I feel to other people. Everyone has their story and can share useful, supportive advice (this is not a cliche- EVERYONE has their own ideas and positive behaviours to share)
-Try to connect with others, preferably new people via existing friends or the online community through mental heath apps or websites connected to my interests.
-Cull my social media of people and sites that are not only knowingly detrimental to my mental health but are also not entirely positive and supportive (I regularly do this anyway and strongy recommend it)
-Be active, preferably outside, be among trees and natural places. Practice good sleep preparation. Reduce my alcohol (I don't drink for this exact reason).
-Online or telephone therapy, preferably Cognitive Behavioural Therapy which is not only extremely successful but lends itself well to telephone contact.
-Do more things I enjoy. I may use this time in lockdown to watch all those old Japanese samurai movies, romcoms and classic horror films I've been promising myself over the years. Also, see: pile of unread novels including a J.G.Ballard 3000-page collection of short stories, Margaret Atwood trilogies, eight new first-time writers and 20 unread poetry collections.
-Try other creative activities. I don't often feel as if I have time to try embroidery, or ceramics, or making masks, or making brooches and jewellery. But I would love to try.
-Plan. I find routine equally essential and boring but, if I was only a slightly different person, it is likely I would find solace in sameness and that I would appreciate a known plan for each day, week and month.
-Try to be good to myself. Be calm, take my time, consider being the person I would want to be friends with.

The Forest

I inhale and I am charged
By the woods breathing on me,
And by the trees allowing me
Their carapace,
As if I were a shield bug chasing caterpillars,
Scuttling in leaf-litter and
Mountaineering the oak roots and
Hilly seed pods
As I chase my youth.

I hover and glide like a Stag beetle
Buoyed by hot asphalt and
A thousand greens.
The forest brings me to it,
Assimilating my salty mass
With sodden lichen and the swish
Of enveloping arms, a sure embrace
Which I let take me.

My breathing slows
And my pace slows
And I slowly close
My eyes and detect the forests'
Weight swathe me.
The birds are indisputabley seductive
And there is no wrong in the world.

The World Inside Wants None of This

They say you grieve because you loved,
Well I am grieving my streets and my trees.
I am craving the swish of the too-tall gumtree,
And the roughness of the rusted seaside handrail.
The electrical box and its' danger of death,
The weak Americano slurped with seagulls.
I miss the stench of cowshit
And the electric jolt of cornflowers.
I miss the threat of hail
And the March freshness needling my face.
I want to see if the lawn at number 37 is snooker tabled,
And the hedge at 72 is at ninety degrees.

Waiting is work and work's goals ridicule me,
and the intrinsic enoughness of play eludes me.
I have a limbic anxiety-
A predator is on the prowl,
Maybe watching, maybe not,
Maybe there, waiting for the right time to pounce, or not.
I am grieving how I used to play with time-
Let it flow and it will pass,
Or impede its' progress and ripples
Would reverberate an impression.
Or I could agree a target and fire an arrow,
I held sway, time was mine.
The world outside is over there
And the world inside wants none of this right now.

Hibernating in Spring

Yesterday I ran and I walked and I tired myself. I slept deeply and woke with this poem in my thoughts.

Hibernating in Spring

It is usually snow that deadens sound

But can’t muffle underground potential. 

It is usually that winter ice causes a pause and provides  

A brace for precarious bursts of Spring newness. 

That time of frost indelibly contributes

To nature’s continual impermanence,

I find those changes reassuring-

It is usually winter that roots me,

That compels me to simplify and prioritise,

To slow down, to notice, to depend. 

Winters’ chilly dormancy is when I am 

Supposed to reclaim nature’s enduring control,

When its indifference tricks me into thinking

I am in charge, I’ve got this. 

It isn’t that the quiet are reflecting

It is that quietness is reflection.

To wait is to anticipate,

To do nothing is to do something.

To start with, nothing happens,

And I am hibernating in Spring.

The Good that Comes from Grief- Not Drowning but Waving

Bird in Space (1923) - Constantin Brancusi

Over the last six years since Ruby died my grief clarified previously opaque aspects of my personality. My grief has been the ultimate prioritiser, stripping away extraneous chaff and forgettable nonsense, enabling me to focus my energy on more important decisions about the directions I was to take- need I become more exclusive or inclusive, what and who matters to me, how do I feel about my job, what sort of father do I want to be, how much anger and love do I want in my life and so on.
Bereavement has been a unique teacher, presenting me with predetermined lessons about which I have no say but also offering a breadth of options, mostly baffling (as has been written before, there is no way around grief, you have to through it- the key skill is the ability to navigate). Grief is about newness and disorientation, about a seemingly unfathomable depth of loss coupled with a revelatory introspection, about open weeping and quiet contemplation.
I have learned a lot. The arduous psychic work has been more challenging than the previous 39 years of my life combined but where there is endeavour, there is usually reward and this is no less true than of grief. I have gained and learned so much from Ruby's death and I use that knowledge to buoy myself when I am drowning a little. I thank her for not only teaching me so much when she was alive but also after she was alive.
Good can come from grief. But it has taken time- many years, really- to distance myself into an occasional objectivity without disconnecting from my bereavement. One of the many lessons I learnt being a patient in  psychotherapy is that I need not fear being without the pain of grief- painlessness won't sever me from my love of Ruby which means I can then become closer to her, to our relationship, to my love of her and the memories of her.

Here are some good things that have come from Ruby's death in my life:

-I let go. Friendships that were hard work, ones that I nostalgically held onto in case they returned to the early days of carefree fun and excitement, were set free. Ones that mattered less, dissolved. Other friendships remained.
-I love more and respect more. It isn't necessary to display affection for all my clients, patients, friends, family members or strangers but to know they are all part of the same humanity as me with a similar complexity of emotions and drives as me has become a default. How can I now judge someone's decisions when I don't know the choices they had?
-I trust more. My old social worker friend Mary used to say "you don't know if you can trust someone until you trust them". It took Ruby's death for me to fully appreciate the profundity of this statement.
-Image is nothing. I should always be honest (but I need not always be open- some things are private)
-I think about how I want to live and then I live like that. Grief has forced me into a colossal introspective review of myself and my life. And if I am reassessing everything that matters to me- or doesn't- then I have to address some deep basics of what makes me me. Do I want to live in fear, playfully, in connection with others, thinking "what if"? Shall I remain as a Nurse or should I nurse some other way and have a new career? How do feel about my wife and my son? Do I think I am a good person? What type of impact to I want to have in the world- none? Some? What do I care about?
This introspective review has been, and continues to be, deeply valuable to me and affecting to those around me. Actively weighing and considering previously recondite attributes and behaviours is a great effort but is worthwhile and important.
-Most time away from Claire and Tom is wasted time. But some isn't.
-If something is neither beautiful nor useful, get rid of it (as per the ideals of William Morris, designer and social activist)
-Culture is more deeply important to me than I had ever realised and it gives me joy and hope and a humanist bond to the living. Art, literally, saved me. There were paintings and sculptures that threw me a tentative lifeline at the worst times of my grief, that proved I can feel and live and breathe again. And now, six years along, there is art that I understand in a way I was simply unable to before.
For years I loved Michelangelo's sculpture Pieta (Jesus in Mary's arms after crucifixion), for example, but dismissed it as over-religious and disconnected from any experience I could understand as an atheist. Now, though, I see Jesus' emaciated body in death and the almost imperceptible depiction of Mary's acceptance of his death and the strength she may gain from it. She knows it was inevitable and she knows his death is not the end but is, in fact, the beginning of something else. He is weightless not because he is emaciated but because she needs to hold him up (in her eyes and in ours). There are techniques used to maximise the emotiveness (eg. Mary is much larger than Jesus so she can cradle him, their body positions in relation to drapes and seating, Mary is too young, etc) but it is the ability to express these ideas in carved stone that tells me more about Michelangelo's probable lived experiences than his skills as an artist. He understood loss and longing and he knew the importance of iconography and of actions, not empty words.
Similarly I always loved Brancusi's sculptures, particularly his "Bird in Space" created in the 1920's and which I saw many years ago at the Tate Modern in London. It is an imposing 200cm tall majestic, vertical swirl of white marble representing, I used to think, a wingless, featureless bird-like creature flying upwards. It is simple and colourless and beautiful. Shortly after Ruby died I looked at it again, I got lost in its curves for many minutes and I cried with the attachment to humanness it afforded me. I realised what I think Brancusi actually meant by "Bird in Space"- the shape was a representation of the potential movement of a bird, it was meant to convey an abstract idea of a bird or a bird-like thing. It wasn't a sculpture of a bird, it was a sculpture that presented me with questions about potential and kinesis, about volume and space and about my relationship within those limits. Art, literally, saved me.
-I think I am a better nurse. I feel a new sensitivity and a new patience in dealing with particular needs of clients. It should be unsaid that nurses should reflect on their skills of empathy (it is a skill to be honed- it is not true that one either has this quality or one does not) but I have found a new appreciation of the effects of grief or heartache or trauma that I can now understand, as opposed to simply "appreciate" or "empathise with". I don't need to imaginatively place myself in my clients' position to begin to appreciate their loss, I know how my loss feels and can therefore extrapolate to a more nuanced but sophisticated starting point- how do they feel in their position?
-I am less damaging to myself, to others and to the world around me because I think I am less of an arsehole to be around and I don't eat meat or drink alcohol anymore. I am much more environmentally aware, I run, I cycle, I look at trees like friends, I love being in the woods- Ruby's death may have added years to my life.
-One of things I take most seriously is to not be serious. I laugh a lot more and I am sillier. Most things are insignificant, they just don't need to be important, they're just not worth it. Most things are just not worth the stress or effort you think they are.

Pieta (1499) - Michelangelo