Anxiety in the time of corona

Coronavirus approached gradually, and then, frighteningly, all at once. The exponential curve began to peel upwards. One week I didn’t know anyone in the UK who’d caught it; the next I'd heard of several people who did. The borders shut almost overnight, and my anxiety closed in. Boris Johnson gave his first COVID-19 update and the university down the road from mine sent an email almost instantly, advising employees to work from home where possible. Mine waited until 9.08am the following morning to send the same instruction, when everyone was already at work. The following day, when we stayed at home, we received guidance on how to work remotely, including taking computer monitors home and forwarding landline calls, the set-up of which required being back in the office. My workplace seemed to be operating 24 hours behind everyone else.

The first day I worked from home the internet kept conking out and I had to jiggle the modem cables to reset it. Each time I was disconnected, the knot of anxiety grew a little more. How ironic, I reflected, that back in times of normality I was keen to work from home to avoid open-plan office distractions. Now my wish was fulfilled; I had seemingly endless home time and no internet to distract me. I missed my workplace. I missed my gym. Each time the modem died I felt further cut off from my friends, family, colleagues, and gym buddies. The walls closed in. It landed mid-afternoon with a thump to the solar plexus, and I found myself dry-heaving dizzily. I logged off and sat outside on the balcony.

I realised what, in particular, was making me so anxious. Travelling has always been my escape and my lifeline to sanity and happiness. What do I do, I thought with panic, when the borders are closed? I had planned to visit at least two new countries this year. I had been dreaming of Uzbekistan and Liechtenstein, the world’s only doubly landlocked countries. I had been half-planning a week hiking the vales and mountains of Liechtenstein’s 75km trail, passing through all eleven of the tiny country’s municipalities. Later in the year, perhaps autumn, I would follow the golden road to Samarkand. What was the point of this pleasant life-work balance I had curated for myself over the last six years, if I was now trapped in the same small space?

I changed and rolled out my blue yoga mat in the front room. Pressing my nose into its sweaty folds, I inhaled deeply. It smelled comfortingly like the mats in my gym. I hadn’t realised how much I liked the scent of sweaty vinyl. (Related: Runners smell delicious).

From somewhere downstairs the fragrance of an incense stick floated in through the open door. I put on a Donna Summer album, which reminded me of happy nights at exactly the other side of the clock, and began following a home workout designed by my gym trainer.

Later, feeling much better, I opened a large beer and sat on the balcony with Jean-Paul Sartre: Iron in the Soul; the final book in his brilliant trilogy, Les chemins de la liberté.

‘Listen!’ said Lubéron. 
‘What to…?’
There was a sort of emptiness about them, a strange tranquility. The birds sang, a cock crowed in the farmyard: far away, someone was hammering rhythmically on metal. But these sounds did not break the overwhelming sense of silence. 

I realised I had not heard a plane flying overhead for several hours. London had fallen silent. A bird, perhaps one of Jimi Hendrix’s mythical parakeets, was shouting victoriously, and the blackbirds answered from the cherry tree. Below, a small black cat slunk into a hedge, observed only by me. The streets and skies were empty.

I raised Sartre to my nose and sniffed the dry, yellow paper. The birds sang.

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