LIFE, INTERRUPTED

When we went into lockdown, little did we know how our lives would change. Pandora Sykes explores the ways in which we will never be the same again

WHEN LOCKDOWN was announced on 23 March, LIFE AS WE KNEW IT ceased to exist. Pandora Sykes REFLECTS ON the strange spring of 2020, and how it might change our LIVES FOR GOOD

It was 3am when I pressed send, filing the book I’d been working on for the past year to my editor. I poured myself a glass of wine, relief coursing through my body, unaware that within two weeks we would be in the grip of a global health crisis.

My book is about how millennial women live. What they think about, talk about and worry about, all circling around one word: choice. Once synonymous with freedom, a surfeit of choice has become a kind of bind. How do we know we’re making the right one?

Then, suddenly, it was taken away. As life’s game of musical chairs ground to a halt, we were confronted with the reality of where our choices have brought us so far: our homes, our loves, our lives. And did we like what we saw?

It would be foolish to write about what we have ‘learnt’ from this suspension and stagnancy of time – it is impossible to rationally and coolly assess such things this close to the eye of the storm. But life as we knew it changed on the day we went into lockdown. The ‘new normal’ was characterised by monotony and contracted realities, but also the chance to interrogate both the lives that we once led and consider the ones that we hope to lead. We can’t go back to ‘before’, so where will we go instead?

Out of CONTROL ...

Being in control is a fundamental part of millennial womanhood. As a deeply controlling individual, my worst fear is losing it – so that I have to collect up my various, contradictory selves, my face red-hot with shame. The pandemic wrested our lives out of our control, affecting people in much the same way that anything does: those with financial security and more physical space fared better than those without. Yet the feeling of being ‘cut loose’ from our lives was universal, as the world opened up their diaries and scored through weddings, parties and holidays.

Perhaps as a distraction from the big things, the smallest things took on an outsized impact: going to the gym, having a haircut, buying a takeaway coffee each morning. The infrastructure of our lives was not so much unpicked as it was decimated. Without our daily routines, pruned and honed over the course of adulthood and often performed on autopilot, we felt lost and nervous.

I began to avoid mirrors, haunted by my inches of dark roots – more than I’d seen since the age of 13 – which, while hardly a thing of global importance, made me feel like a stranger was staring back at me. One wild night, I sat down and shaved the dead skin from my husband’s feet with an electric foot file. I felt a disproportionately large sense of satisfaction as the clouds of dead skin particles billowed into my face. ‘I can’t control anything outside this house,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘But I can take charge of your hairy hooves.’

I am wary of silver linings; they feel insulting to those in the grip of despair. But if there is one to be found, one thing to take forward, it would be that we have been forced to rescind control of anything beyond our own four walls. Our attention, when not flicking to the BBC News app, was suddenly focused on spice racks, at-home workouts and an endless roster of box sets. Mastering a new dish (for me, chicken laksa) or finishing a puzzle took on a new significance. I grew tired of trying to predict when it would all be over. At a certain point, I decided to surrender to the ‘not knowing’ and, probably for the first time in my entire life, take each day as it came. For someone who is never not looking ahead – to the next work project, the next holiday, the next birth – it took a lot of discipline. I had to forcibly corral my thoughts every time they wandered into the future. I wonder if we’ll be able to… No! Today I am healthy. Today I am working. Today I am mothering. Tomorrow, for now, is a foreign land I no longer allow myself to fly to.

“THE FEELING OF BEING ‘cut loose’ FROM OUR LIVES WAS universal, AS THE WORLD opened up their diaries AND SCORED THROUGH weddings, parties AND HOLIDAYS”

Did coronavirus KILL ROMANCE?

Having recently had my second child, my husband and I had a jump start on functioning as one another’s sole social life. We were already maestros of hibernation; our conversation as limited as our weary footsteps. It also meant that we were, to put it politely, quite looking forward to seeing other people. And yet, at a time when ‘’til death do us part’ took on an ominous new shade, I was pathetically grateful to have someone to lean on.

People speak of luxury in new terms now – the top trump is not a handbag or a holiday, but a meadow – but I am most grateful to be sequestered with someone I do not feel ashamed to share my anxieties or worries with.

For the non-coupled, as with anything that involves a degree of freedom and whimsy, the logistics of romance became sorely challenged. Online dating became the only dating and The Guardian Blind Date column valiantly soldiered on, without any possibility of a hook-up. Two women gave polite, kind reviews of their virtual date, minus the sour punch of in-real-life anxiety or the smouldering gaze that can, on the best dates, scorch napkins. And yet usage of dating apps soared, with many seeking not sex but communication. Too Hot To Handle – a terrible Love Island-esque reality show where contestants were not allowed to have sex in the hope that it would confine their frisky, superficial dating habits – began trending as the numberone show. The palm trees were galling but, for those isolating alone, the chastity and yearn for connection was apt.

Queasily delicious rumours of Zoom orgies (2O21’s entry into the OED: ‘zorgies’?) abounded and the dating behemoth Badoo reported that 49% of people on dating apps were having longer conversations. And, in the park, I noticed teenage couples exchanging furtive knee rubs and kisses on benches – away from the gaze of law-abiding, parental eyes. I wondered if they felt like Romeo and Juliet; if, to them, there was a tinge of romance to it all. Kept apart by forces they could subvert, but not overcome. I’d like to think that by the time you read this, we will be picnicking in parks; feeding one another stinky, gooey cheese on baguettes and clinking plastic glasses full of rosé. Will romance have changed? We’ll probably tell one another ‘I love you’ less, because we’ll have ways to show it instead. I bet you’ll see more snogging: by the tube, on the kerb, in the pub. Even from me – a married mother of two, who really should know better.

“FOR the THE logistics NON-COUPLED, of romance BECAME SORELY CHALLENGED. The use of dating apps SOARED AS PEOPLE sought not sex BUT COMMUNICATION“

The ZOOM EFFECT ...

At first, it felt exciting. Technology moved to fill the void in human intimacy: my husband Zoomed all day, then Housepartied all night, pausing only to charge his phone. I felt both claustrophobic and relieved to be stuck at home – to no longer need an excuse to go to bed early with a book.

In a way, we’d been generationally prepping for social distancing. Millennials are as well-versed in FOGO as much as they are FOMO, famously dreading phone calls. In quarantine, we became polyvocal. We weren’t going out, but we were never really alone: days filled with the pixelated frozen gurns of others. ‘I miss you,’ I told my mother sadly, one day. I longed for the comforting outline of her, propped up on my sofa drinking tea. ‘I don’t miss you!’ she said merrily, her iPhone balanced on her bosom so that I had the perfect view up her nostrils. ‘I see you all the time.’

After the first four weeks, we began to sag. Unable to escape both our homes and ourselves, the pressure of pay cuts and lonely or ill relatives weighed heavily. I lost someone I loved dearly (for non-Covid-related reasons) and felt waterlogged with tiredness. It seeped into my bones; everything felt as if I was trapped under a film.

Brené Brown dubbed it the ‘collective weary’. Tired, fed up and with none of the intimacy of an IRL encounter, FaceTime started to feel like a chore. My husband jettisoned his Houseparties. Communication became exhausting and exhaustive. Friendships that had always distilled easily into written missives flourished, while those that bloomed only when you could feel one another’s hot breath across a small, sticky table did not necessarily wither, but certainly lost some of its petals. Speaking less, as many of us began to do, also became a type of freedom. As the pandemic forced us apart, we considered what makes a meaningful relationship and what we value about the people in our lives.

In tandem with this housebound introspection, local social cohesion has flourished. Every Thursday at 8pm, I wept on my doorstep as my neighbours and I came together to bang pots and pans, to Clap for our Carers. Flyers were pushed through letterboxes daily, informing us about volunteers who could pick up food and medicine for you, if you were isolating. I texted a woman I had never met and offered to help her deliver groceries. Of course, it is not all Kumbaya. For every sympathetic smile or nod across the road, there is a man who will lean out of his car, as he did last night, and call me a slag for trying to walk two metres away from his friend. A pandemic does not turn a tosser into a saint, just like a virtual party cannot replace a nightclub, no matter how drunk you get.

And yet there is a wistfulness to our communication. When we’ve talked about how technology has eroded our sense of community, we’ve used the erasure of a once-familiar image: people chatting at a bus stop. I hope that when we are no longer scared to leave our homes, having grown sick of our phones, we might find ourselves turning to our fellow comrade at the bus stop and greeting them hello.

“THE ‘COLLECTIVE WEARY’: tired, fed up and with NONE OF THE INTIMACY of an IRL ENCOUNTER, communication became EXHAUSTING AND EXHAUSTIVE”

The LEGACY...

The mothering of young children can often feel like its own type of quarantine, but that incubation is typically more societal than it is geographic. As nurseries and playgrounds and music classes shuttered, the relentless tedium – already a baseline condition of motherhood, over which all the good stuff like joy, affection and adventure is layered – weighed heavily on many mothers, especially those living in confined quarters or without a partner.

But the presence of children meant that a welcome sense of momentum sliced through the stagnancy. I was made aware of the passing of time not by outside forces, but the extremely intimate: my son learning to roll over; my daughter relinquishing her nappies. I became intensely attuned to every tiny developmental milestone, which I might have otherwise missed.

As someone who regretted not taking proper maternity leave after having each of my children, lockdown did have a silver lining, for which I am enormously grateful: it allowed me a restorative physical proximity to my baby for longer than I’d otherwise planned. I found myself torn between wanting to speed through this whole pandemic, to leap to the end of it all – whenever that may be – and feeling guilty that, in doing so, I was wishing away my son’s precious babyhood.

It is now, more than any other time, that I wish I kept a journal. How will I explain to my children – properly and accurately explain – what life was like, that spring of 2O2O? How will I tell my son that his life, certainly for his first six months, was overshadowed by a pandemic of the likes that we have never seen before?

I am sure the bells of our collective anxiety will dull and quieten over time, and this extraordinary health crisis will be boiled down into a few rote points: we had to walk far apart; they closed the playgrounds and the shops; lots of people lost their jobs and far too many lost their lives. It will become an abstract, collective grief, like all historic moments when we reflect back upon them.

One day, soon from now, my daughter won’t remember any of it: the Peppa Pig-shaped jelly she was obsessed with, or the fact that she couldn’t leave the house more than once a day for two months. Children may soon forget their parents’ clumsy attempts at homeschooling; teenagers, their sense of loss, as proms and festivals were cancelled. But, whatever we choose to remember or accidentally forget, it was the spring that changed us. How Do We Know We’re Doing It Right? by Pandora Sykes is out 16 July

“NOW, MORE THAN ANY other time, I wish I KEPT A JOURNAL. How will I EXPLAIN TO MY CHILDREN – properly AND ACCURATELY – what life was like, that SPRING OF 2O2O?”