Julia Taylor
Anxiety Tourism
It’s 2021 and Covid has cancelled our holidays for the second year running. I don’t know about you – it’s a great day for our anxiety to take a vacation.
What’s keeping me up at night (and I have a three month old baby assisting), is this constant nagging question: what would’ve happened if Covid had happened at different times in my life? How would I have coped? Would myself and my family have had a different experience?
I was reading about Donna Coleman, and my anxiety took an outing to 1998 when I still lived with my parents and my Mum worked (more than) full time in further education. I started to spiral thinking about what would’ve happened to her had Covid struck then. She was always under so much pressure from her bosses, just like Donna was. Students were considered autonomous at her college, in a way high school students are not. There was no pastoral care for anyone, no authority over students.
I frequently think about when I was trapped in an emotionally abusive relationship: told often that I didn’t care about my baby daughter, scared into believing we couldn’t survive on our own, gaslit and manipulated: “other men would’ve hit you by now”. I was suicidal then. And so I let my anxiety take a road trip back there to consider lockdown in that environment, 300 miles from my wider supportive family.
This week I was reminded of the open heart surgery my Dad had in 2019. He had been waiting three years for his deteriorating arteries to be replaced with pig skin versions. His mental health was in tatters as he feared heart failure at any moment. And I consider what would’ve happened if Covid had struck just 12 months earlier and he had been left, clinically and psychologically vulnerable, another two years without treatment.
I think about my early 20s when I isolated myself to nurture an eating disorder (social events = calories), and how it was only because of the persistence of friends forcing visits on me, that I was able to see a way out. What if we’d been locked down and not allowed to visit our friends then? Would the outcome be different?
So as lockdown lifts, there is a sense of there but the grace of God go I, but mostly this anxiety tourism is fuelling my nightmares and keeping me awake. They are technicolor: because it is happening, albeit without me. I am so, so lucky to have a loving family, a nearby bubble, and a nice home. I’ve worked hard for it, and it’s not come easy. But there are so many people like Donna, or waiting for surgery, or in need of a pal’s support, or living with their abuser and no means of escape. And all the other countless snapshot moments of my life that I escaped from. I see you. I see you all going through it. And my heart cries out to you. Keep going. You can break free, I promise.
