THE YEAR I MOVED IN WITH MY PARENTS, AGED 30
IN APRIL, two weeks into lockdown, I fled to my parents’ house in Bath via Paddington. The deserted station with its boards of cancelled exit strategies made it feel appropriately like the end of the world.
It was the end of mine as I knew it. I drank a whole bottle of M&S wine on the empty train, hoping it would dull the panic of leaving London after seven years of being proudly self-sufficient. At the other end I had to ask my parents to let their broke and broken daughter move back
home. Indefinitely. My generation seemed to have two options in lockdown: get engaged or write a book. Me? I left the boyfriend who didn’t want me to write a book.
It was hard to start with: more heartbroken than I’d ever been and without any of the crutches I usually relied on: nights out, the gym, rebounds (bringing someone back to my teenage bedroom in my retired parents’ semi-detached house not an option). At first I felt like I was clinging to a raft in raging waters: my bedroom with its PE trophies making me feel, at 30, like I’d regressed to an age where I spent pocket money on Pokémon cards. I walked alone through the country lanes and lay drunk in fields of hay wondering, endlessly, what was going to happen to me. Then I realised that drinking excessively threatened to capsize me and gave it up completely.
I tried some social-distance dating. I met a teacher who quoted Shakespeare at the table (tick) but laughed at none of my jokes (required); a pizza chef who tried to put his hand up my top like we were 15; a boy I used to work with in a shoe shop when I was 18 who still smelt like egg-whites.
I wrote not one book but two, and found I could afford therapy. I realised I’d been looking for stability and a home in the men I chose, that I was scared of being alone.
I never would have dreamed of moving back home if it wasn’t for the pandemic. Now I realise parental anchoring was the thing I needed most in the world.
Lucid by Lucy Holden (simon & schuster) is out in June 2021.