Hello? Can you hear me?

I seem to have got lost.

Damn.

I was doing so well.

Lockdown Weeks 1 and 2 – I was a role model to myself. In bliss with ML and Sefi. Breakfast yoga. Morning walks in wonder at the raspberry-ness of the blossom trees. Cooking from actual recipe books. Doing Zooming. Writing every day. EVERY DAY!

Week 3 – Woah, gone a bit shakey.

Week 4 – Abstracted. Furious. Tired. Sad. Anxious. Can’t connect.

Week 5 – Hello, I think I may be coming back…Hello? No. Sorry. Gone again.

Week 6: Desperate to feel connected. I know numbness is self-protection and I can’t bully myself out of it, but I hate what it takes from me. I’d been loving the flow of frequent writing. It’s my time, I’d thought, while the news bled out daily death tolls.

But then something shifted.

Days without writing stacked up. Frustration and fury followed but not in any way I could get hold of. I’d get a whiff before they disappeared, me along with them. I can write in states of distress or exhaustion but I can’t write if I don’t exist.

There is only one thing for it. To be exactly where I am in all its inelegance and discomfort. Share the pile of scruffy jumble in my head. Let go of all the lost days, forgive myself all I wanted to write and didn’t; be with what is right here. That is all.

So, that is what I have done.

Hello there.