My loyal reader will doubtless be thrilled to know I’ve been bumped up the NHS waiting list in order to have an assessment as early as next week in order to see just how mad I am at the moment. Well, I say mad because that’s how many people see us mental people. Perhaps, a few weeks of therapy will give me a glass that’s half full instead of my regular glass, which is far more than half empty.
Like many of you, I’m extremely weary of COVID-19, far more weary than I was when Brexit dominated the agenda. Even though there is nothing good about Brexit and it will make many people poorer, it probably won’t kill us. COVID-19 just might kill us and we don’t yet know if there will be long term consequences for those who’ve had it.
I had an horrendous ‘new’ cough in February and I spent a week or so extremely breathless. My joints hurt like hell, too. I put it down to the season, my age and my asthma, which is usually worse in the winter months. And because COVID-19 was something that was happening to people all over the world but it would never come here. We have British exceptionalism to protect us from killer viruses. Britannia, you see, rules the waves. But she doesn’t. She never has in my lifetime.
This grim and ugly Saturday afternoon feels to me like the first day of autumn, or winter as I call it. It’s a cool, damp 18c out there and whilst it’s getting slightly warmer next week, it’s going to be wet, too. I might need more than one mental health therapist this year.
I’m gloomy about everything at the moment. COVID-19 has buggered up everything and maybe it’s also buggered up people’s opinions on me. My self-imposed isolation of recent years since my mental health meltdown at the hands of the British Red Cross (my usual reminder: don’t give those bastards anything. A huge amount of what they raise goes towards admin and highly paid managers, of whom there are many. And they’re bastards), seems to have persuaded some people I know, or rather used to know, that I’m probably not the sort of person to join them for a social evening or a round of golf. My depression obviously doesn’t give me a great deal of self-worth but I can’t but help conclude that it’s okay for someone not to be okay, especially if you don’t have to see them. So, there’s my quandary. I was self-isolating long before COVID-19 came along due to being fucking mad and now people would prefer it if I self-isolated for a bit longer and not mess up their afternoons. Maybe they always hated me, anyway?
Not that I have that much energy to do much anyway. Five months of enforced lethargy has not given me energy to burn. Rather a desire to not do anything. Maybe friends and acquaintances have picked up on that and thought, “Sod him. We can have much more fun socialising/playing golf among ourselves.”
In any event, not for the last time, it isn’t all right to not be all right. Feeling not all right – and I am sorry this is a particularly sweary blog today, but it was that or nothing – doesn’t not feel all right and I am convinced that secretly other people are thinking that, too. My brain now tells me I would be as welcome as rabies in a home for guide dogs in most social circles. I’m not confident to reach out to others and their lives are better without me.
And I’m increasingly tired and my joints still ache. A hangover from COVID-19, which I probably haven’t had, advancing old age, clinical depression, a combination of all of these things, some or none. So next week’s assessment, over the bloody phone and I am crap conveying this stuff on the phone to someone I don’t know and have never met and they will probably think I’m just another whingeing twat who ought to get over himself and snap out of it.
I want to be on my own and I don’t want to be on my own. Hardly compatible aims, eh? I hope this therapist knows what s/he is doing. I can’t put up with much more of this.
