The Pandemic Chewed Me Up And Spat Me Out
And I’m not sure I’m better for it
Do you remember when the lockdowns began?
We were all baking bread and singing “toss a coin to your Witcher,” whilst making glib remarks on Twitter.com?
Then they dragged on.
Ever deeper lockdowns descended upon us, a heavy cloud rumbling across the sky like a dark blanket. We all got tired. So tired. Tired of the endless news briefings, tired of the daily statistics, tired of the alarmist headlines, of closed churches, missing friends, cancelled weddings, and of the painstainking way we now had to shop for groceries.
The past two years have been the hardest of my life, and yet, I feel guilty for not making them good. For not making more of them. Why would they be good? There was a literal plague occurring. There’s no reason they would be good. There’s no rational reason anyone would have enjoyed them. They were objectively harder for everyone apart from a particular class of parvenu.
I didn’t learn how to bake bread, or knit, or redecorate my house. I caught up on some reading, podcasts and movies and that’s about it. In the first half of 2020, I found myself pregnant with my ex-boyfriend’s baby. My son must have been conceived two weeks before we split up (despite using preventative…
