When I read the prompt - list five things I noticed my environment today - I thought about it for a moment and realised I hadn’t noticed anything. Or, I had noticed things but they had made no impact on me, they had just blended into the vagueness that my life has taken on since the start of lockdown, where days are indistinguishable from each other and time has no punctuation. Maybe I would be expected to feel upset by how my life has become so formless and blank, but I’m more disturbed by how attractive this formlessness is to me and how much I feel drawn to it.
The sensible part of my mind compares it to the way in which alcoholics are drawn the oblivion that drinking provides and I know a lot of the stress I’m feeling at the moment is down to not being able to surrender to the blankness, due to the constraints of work and children.
I always suspected that my need for routine wasn’t because I was ‘routine-oriented’ but because I knew, subconsciously, that routine was the way I kept myself present and accountable, normal and connected. How much of my other behaviours are learned in this way? Is my sociability, my desire to talk to people, just a way to stop me disappearing into a much more attractive and interesting world inside my head? Do I watch tv to try to engage safely with a world that I find perplexing? Am I much more like my closed-off, almost-hermit father than I realised? Will I, given a chance, disappear like he has? Will I find the real me in this lockdown and stay there with her, never to be seen again?
Anonymous
