Polly Vernon

SATURDAY WAS WEIRD. I saw some friends, who intro’d me to their friends

– the first time I’d met anyone new since this began – which felt nice in the moment, chill and (whisper it) normal. But afterwards? I was overwhelmed by a self-consciousness, a shame I hadn’t experienced since I was 13. Was I too loud in front of the new people (I wondered)? Too flirtatious? Too Ott-look-at-me com-e-dy? Too instantly intimate, too inadequately boundary’d?

Oh God: I was, wasn’t I? And I wasn’t even drunk! How grotesque! How like me! How like I always am, always have been… And so on, until I’d skedaddled down an emotional rabbit hole I could only identify as ‘no one at school likes me’, because that was the last time I’d felt such things. ‘I suppose I could call it FOOP (fear of other people) and write a column about it?’ I said to myself, in the interest of calming me down. Then I said the word ‘FOOP’ out loud, because it felt nice. And then I realised what I was experiencing is more modernly referred to as ‘social anxiety’, that it’s a predictable consequence of my semi-reemergence into semi-society – and I need not give it another thought.

A day later, I lay in bed, on the brink of sleep – when I was consumed by pulses of panic: demon pinches of fear that had no basis in anything I could name, but which rippled up and down my body, from my feet to my hairline, till I couldn’t bear to lie there with them any more; I had to get up, pace, breathe them into submission.

A day after that, I realised I couldn’t remember a time I’d had a dream that wasn’t nightmare-tinged; hadn’t been jolted awake first thing by an adrenaline rush so fierce it would have pulled me out of cardiac arrest.

A day after that, the entirely-unlike-me public crying began.

And so I felt it: the dank, dark, half-light of mild depression. The leaching of selfworth. The leaden drag of just being.

But it went!

And it came back.

It went again!

It will be back.

The corona crisis wraps its filthy little hands around my mental health. Starts squeezing it like a stress toy, releasing for just long enough to make it crueller yet when it decides it wants another go on my head, heart, capacity to hope.

I shouldn’t be surprised. There was only so much time I – any of us – could exist with such a diminished sense of safety, certainty, or power to change anything without feeling bad, in the existential sense. And I know I’ll get through it; I know exactly how to deal (exercise, minimal booze, much talk). But MOTHERF**KER! Our health, our economy, our fundamental sense of selves… Is there no part of us this pandemic won’t attempt to disembowel; a serial killer for everything we are?