Anyone still suffering lockdown fallout?

[EmmaEmerald]

I don’t want to tag any of the original people who helped me out a lot as I know this thread will attract a lot of nasty folk

but every so often I feel absolutely in shock still at how the fallout goes on.

suppose I’m seeking reassurance it won’t be like this forever but it might be, I guess.

For me lockdown was the best time of my life. I have never been so mentally and physically well and apart from the pandemic part I wish that the circumstances for me could have carried on forever.

Before anyone gets pissed off at that, bear in mind that many years preceding lockdown and all the years after are the ones that I struggle with. For me I'll never be as happy as I was during lockdown and that's my lockdown fallout.

I think it’s really changed my outlook on life. I found it terrifying how people people turned on each other and how easily everyone just did what they were told without any questioning. It’s also made me very fearful of what the next big pandemic will be. I loved the peace and quiet myself but it had a devastating effect on the family.

I don’t give it any thought. It was a weird time and it felt strange to not have control over my life, but I consider it an odd little adventure and I moved on.
I occasionally talk about it with friends and we laugh at how crazy the whole thing was- queues in shops, arrows everywhere to tell you where to walk, masks, odd atmospheres…

But other than that, I don’t give it a second thought really.

Was talking to my Dad yesterday as he asked me why there were so many people with mental health problems now, I said Lockdown.

You take away everything people knew, some will be fine, some won't. Isolating people will have a knock on effect for years to come. Our economy wouldn't have been as bad if it wasn't for lockdown, we would have coped with just Brexit.

Before lockdown I was out regularly, I went out once last year. I used to meet my friend for lunch every week, we did it 4 times last year. My social life since lockdown is almost non-existent as people now either don't have the money or don't want to go out.

Well I'm divorced as a result of events that happened pretty much because of lockdown so I suppose I'm dealing with the fallout all the time really.

I'm sad the events happened but I'm glad I'm now divorced.

I used to think if I'd have lived in Germany in the 1930s I'd have been bravely hiding Jews and homosexuals in my loft.

Now I can see that fear for my own family from basically nothing more than propaganda during lockdown means I definitely wouldn't have been. I was so fucking terrified I followed all the rules unquestioningly, became insufferabls and officious and judged everyone, even when I became severely depressed and had daily panic attacks.

I am not as intelligent or as brave as I thought. It's a hard truth to swallow!

Well, my kids are young enough that they seem unscathed, though the older one gets every germ going much worse than the rest of us so I do wonder about whether her immune system was affected by lack of exposure to germs at a very young age.

DH and I are mostly ok. But there's a sort of underlying distrust/ fear of authority going on for both of us - feeling like if they can lock us all up at the drop off a hat, what else might they decide to do?

We've also found that we went into lockdown as a very social childless couple and came out of it with a toddler (and were expecting another child before all the restrictions ended in our part of the world) and it's much harder to work out what a social life with a child looks like when you're starting off from that point.

I'm just grateful that it's in the past and to have made it through the other side with my loved ones. Not everyone got that.

Yeah it was rough for all of us, some definitely worse than others. But you have to be grateful and focus on the positives and all the things we can do and look forward to now.

I am sorry to hear this. It struck a chord with me. Being a single parent, my social life was relatively constrained anyway, but lockdown made it definitely worse and harder - and then I have had a fairly full-on job since then.
I started going to the gym to get my fitness back and just to be around people and I also go to a coffee shop when I have a WFH day as I cannot stand to work at home any more.
i totally relate to the poster who says they don’t like being at home anymore.

I had long covid and was unwell for a good year. There was one point afterwards where I looked at photos from pre-pandemic of me and the DC on holiday and thought, was that us? It seems like another life. Covid has done something to my memory, or the way I view the past. I remember DD was really upset one day during lockdown and I was saying to her well, no wonder, people are not supposed to be in isolated little prisons. She developed anxiety in 2021, she had a breakdown in the summer before university. She is doing really well now, though. She was lucky as they had small classes so she didn’t have all online learning when she was in first year so that really helped her. That’s the other thing, I hate Teams and Zoom now.

Same here tbh. I don't really remember most of it these days in that it's just something that happened and the we moved on. Aware though that that's probably because it had very little impact like it did for others.

Fair play to you for recognising that, you might be the first person I've seen acknowledge that you got a bit swept along by the media/rules.

Me. I realised I'm autistic as the first lockdown was easing and was diagnosed in 2022. Still working out what that means for my life, career, marriage etc.

As an HCP I was only in lockdown for 6wks. We are fully back to normal, unlike GPs, our area of health care is impossible to do over the phone and lockdowns demonstrated just how much we quietly work in our little area of the NHS (currently in the news headlines because they have finally conceded that the service is terminal).
As lockdowns restrictions were coming to an end I was diagnosed with breast cancer and DH had a stroke a few months later. In the scheme of things more people die of cancer each year than died during the pandemic and as a result of the mass fear many more will die because they were late seeking treatment. Covid for the majority of people was a bad cold and many had it without any symptoms. I’ve had covid every year, inevitable in my job, in fact it delayed my surgery but it has never affected me the way cancer has or the impact of DH’s stroke.
I have a patient base in the thousands, we lost 2-3 patients to Covid, only one of which was admitted to ICU, we have lost a much higher number to late diagnosed cancer and other chronic diseases that were not adequately treated during the pandemic.
We were talking about the pandemic yesterday and most felt that it was a distant memory. We have moved on.
Maybe cancer has forced me to concentrate on today and tomorrow. My diagnosis sort of put a full stop to the pandemic. I’ve boxed it up and archived it, just another event to move on from. I do have the benefit of age so 2yrs is a very short time in my 60yrs. It’s all relative. My DS 19 suffered but for him it was a significant part of his life affecting the GCSE and A level years. I fully understand that they are the ones who will feel the impact of the pandemic for years to come.
I think that we need to move on and leave it behind, as have generations before us after major world events either natural or man made.

I think it's interesting how little anyone I know talks about it. I don't know whether people are traumatised by it or embarrassed tbh.

I think for some of us the only thing we can do is almost to pretend it never happened. I might have done that, except for the whole thing about now having children, which means I can't just snap back to "normal".

I hear you, OP. I am so sorry that you are still experiencing the fallout from lockdown, and suspect that millions of others are too. But then they get shouted down, their experiences are swept under the rug and sometimes particularly tone deaf people will just talk about what a jolly time they had when you were suffering.

Sadly the people who are going to be most affected by lockdown for years after it ended, are those who already get overlooked by society - those with severe mental illness, vulnerable children, domestic violence victims, or god forbid all of the above. The list of groups affected and the ways in which they were harmed goes on and on and on. It is so common, and people lack the insight or imagination to engage with it, and it doesn’t benefit politicians to revisit the harm that they have caused.

I agree with a previous post here about how lockdown changed my view of others/society. So many people became officious, curtain-twitching nightmares who would happily “inform” on their closest loved ones. I used to think of myself as quite a left-leaning individual, but then saw how much of my political “tribe” seemed to yearn for authoritarianism and pour scorn on those who intelligently questioned the rationale for decisions.

My life is amazing now and I truly don’t things could be better even if I won the lottery, and perversely we benefitted hugely financially from the after effects of lockdown, and it will benefit our family for generations to come (No we weren’t selling PPE, totally unrelated industry 😂). However, I was forced to live apart from my husband during lockdown because of the nonsense rules, I lost my sister and my father but was unable to see them and to hold them, my mother was left on her own at home with what turned out to be a broken limb and refused a home visit but told over the phone to just “rest and move when you can,” and then finally after being reunited with my husband, I got pregnant but then had to labour without him for hours in 2021, as if that would somehow keep me or any of the staff or other patients safe. My mother never recovered. I don’t know what part of lockdown was most traumatic for me personally, but my blood runs cold when I think of the utter hell that vulnerable children experienced when there is neglect, violence or mental illness in their homes.

Yes, agree that not talking about it could be because of trauma, embarrassment or because it might not matter anymore. Everyone was affected differently and I think anyone who has only met me recently would be very surprised by what I wrote above. Even those who know me well would probably not realise, because I tend to not talk about private matters to anyone apart from my husband…. And mumsnet.

It’s admirable you can see that about yourself now. I’ve lost faith in human nature.

Everything was more affordable before lockdown I was worried because I had to come out of work because ds is disabled I thought I had time to sort everything now he is going to secondary school his dla is up for renewal this year I've done nothing every avenue is shut "due to covid" ds1 is school refusing to a massive degree and failing his gcses and I'm in a constant state of panic but I cant see a Dr how can I tell them I've got nothing done in four years! (Even if I could get an appointment 🙄)

Thanks, but to be honest the realisation has been like a mini identity crisis. By the time we got to Christmas 2020 I KNEW it was wrong and was putting people more vulnerable than me in a different sort of danger (eg dv victims) but it was "a small sacrifice" and "doing the right thing." We didn't qualify for any keyworker places at school or anything so home schooling 3 kids with a 2 year old running round was pretty brutal; I can't imagine what it was like for those without gardens or company or enough money.

My only saving grace is I didn't get one of those banners on my Facebook profile picture saying "stay the fuck home" or similar that can haunt me on my 5 Years Ago... reminders 😂

Lockdown just feels like a weird fever dream to me.

I don't feel like it had any major or significant impact on me or my life.

Same for me. I’m embarrassed when I think about how I got sucked into it all and judged people! I remember seeing 3 boys playing football over the park out of my window and thinking ‘you’re only supposed to socialise with one other person! It’s not fair, my kids are following the rules, how dare they!’ What a fool I was.

It has completely changed me as a person though and opened my eyes to how manipulative the government and media can be. I question everything now and although it sometimes feels cynical and depressing to be that way, I don’t think it’s a bad thing. Feel like my eyes are finally open (and yes I know I sound like a tin foil hat wearer).

One of my parents ended up paralysed due to not being taken into hospital during lockdown, I am reminded of lockdown every time I see them, I'm totally traumatised by it and I doubt that will ever change.

I'm so sorry for your loss. I hope your beautiful children give you strength.

The effects are long lasting for us. Already disabled DH lost his limited ability to walk. We shielded for the best part of 3 years and now rarely go out as it's so difficult. GS became disengaged from school, by the time he got back into gear he had missed so much I doubt he will get the grades he would have. This is possibly going to impact his entire life. We were always close but the bond has been stretched. I know things would have changed but a guillotine came down on contact and it's been hard to re-establish. Equally I now strongly suspect it was for nothing and we were badly advised. There's a book called Expire, an analysis of what went on, which is worth a read. I know people have suffered a lot more than us, but this is a sample of our lived experience.