This is now a social distancing blog
23rd & 24th March 2020
I’ve had this tab open on my computer to write since last week. I’ve been putting pressure on myself to be creative and to try and document this, but felt a bit too overwhelmed each time to do it. I am now going to try and be DISCIPLINED, largely for myself as I am fairly certain only my mum and the odd recruiter (if I am lucky haha! Job hunting in a global pandemic! haha!) will read this.
My freelance job in the performing arts (doing administration and marketing) has steadily unravelled since Boris told everyone to avoid the theatres. I am one of many in this position and there is little being offered in the way of protection for self-employed workers like myself beyond the statutory sick pay offered via universal credit. I am fortunate in that I also work freelance as a tutor, and I was able to start more hours just before it all descended.
It stings to be so easily dropped by society and left vulnerable. So far my mornings have been positive and productive; a semblance of normality can easily be replicated with a shower, a coffee and a superficially optimistic outlook. Deep breaths, Gabrielle!! It is after lunch that the despair strikes, bringing new meaning to the term ‘afternoon slump.’
Will I keep up the painting?
Probably not
I have noticed that it occurs after separate but COVID-19 related incidences (because what ISN’T coronavirus related these days?) have mounted up. Despite my desire to maintain the yogi-like positive outlook of my morning, lunch offers spare minutes to think about the world and (importantly) look on Twitter. This can induce a state of panic, fear and utter lack of self-confidence that makes the tears come streaming out in full force.
And a bit of me wants to wallow in the awfulness of the whole situation everyday; to stay in bed reading yet more articles about the spread of the virus in my silky pjs and think about the book I won’t write. BUUT I am resolved to de-emphasise how bleak it is and to try and find alternative ways of conceptualising this…
I have been thinking a little about the irony of it for me. For context: I just finished my final masters project about death awareness, for which the overriding argument of my piece was that there needs to be a better acknowledgement of the randomness of the Universe and that, as much as we may try to control it with our various technological tools, nature always prevails.
In this project, I was thinking about the social inability to talk about death in the West (particularly Britain), but I think it resonates with this current crisis. Coronavirus has hit hard because we were so utterly unprepared for something of this magnitude. We navigate(d) a world so saturated in its systems that we began to believe we were somewhat infallible. And for out moments of infallibility, we have insurance, advanced legal and financial risk systems as well as predictive AI technologies. This is not to say that coronavirus was unpredictable — it only took a glance backwards to get the sense that a storm might just be brewing. The point is that the threat truly arrived, it shocked us. And now we live on a day by day basis — a crazy reminder that we are never really in control.
From our separate quarantined homes, any given day starts to look an awful lot like the others. Businesses and people alike plunge into their reserves and savings respectively. We are plagued with worry about where this outbreak will leave us and when it will end. It only seems like a week or so ago that I was peering into future, bored by the prospect of living out a 9 to 5 in a mediocre job for eternity, suddenly that stability and predictability is something I crave. Now, the most useful thing we can do is to not do anything at all, which leaves a lot of time for staring out of the window and fearing oblivion.
So in this attempt at consoling myself, I crave some kind of rationale. The virus itself seems an easy but unfair choice of enemy. COVID-19 is nothing without people being there to spread it. Technically, it did not DO anything but its job and its doing it quite well. (Poor little Covid-19!) When you think about it, the virus is a trace of all the places we visited, all the surfaces we touched, all the sweaty crowds we moved through and all the countries we flew to without ever really reflecting on the possible consequences of our physical existence within them. Now, our own penchant for social spreading and overconsumption are being reflected back in our faces and it is our responsibility to reconsider our behaviours if we want to co-exist again in the future.
This is where we take our cues from the government and, quite frankly, their public responses to this crisis continuously miss the mark. Boris Johnson has leveraged the language of warfare in some of his speeches, and the media has been rife with comparisons to World War II restrictions. “It is a war against this virus,” he said in his press conference last night but the war is not really against the virus, is it? The virus is a scapegoat for their seismic failure to protect the society they were voted to serve. And if there is any war, it is one against the very fabric of our daily lives (and, naturally, the ugly face of capitalism).