Will this ever end? Dark thoughts today

[Lissy23]

I’ve just read an article stating that this South African variant may be able to be caught again, by people who have already had and recovered from the virus...so where does that leave us if true? And that it also may evade vaccination.

I was feeling more optimistic the last few days with the excellent and efficient vaccine roll out and the infections coming down...however I’m now having some very dark thoughts, my DP and I are in a long distance relationship, I haven’t seen him since December due to our individual living and work situations meaning we cannot form a bubble. I’m missing him desperately and we were going to see each other end of March (he has provisionally booked an air b&b to stay in near to where I live) I have no idea if that’ll go ahead now, if lockdown is still in place and travel restrictions still an issue. I also haven’t seen my parents in 7 months and counting, due to the distance between us (200 miles) and the fact my parents are frightened of catching it, despite not having any co-morbidities or anything, but convinced they’ll end up on a ventilator if they catch it.

I have a 2 year old and it’s very difficult being stuck in the majority of the day with him. I miss playgroups.

I’m starting to feel like there’s no point in going on...there will be new variants coming up all the time surely? How will we ever get out of this mess? Lockdown will never end and there will always need to be a trade off between schools returning and other things opening.
I just really miss going to the cinema on a whim, popping into a cafe to escape the rain to read my book and have a coffee & piece of cake...playgroups, soft play, seeing people in person opposed to on a screen

Don’t know how to go on much longer...if it wasn’t for my DS.

@paulhollywoodshairgel we might indeed all be in the same STORM, but we are very much not all in the same BOAT. I suspect that those who wish to call those struggling 'weaklings' are in the lovely luxury yachts. They can't comprehend how things might feel different to those in the cramped canal boats, or the little fishing boats, or the tiny rickety rowing boats.

@paulhollywoodshairgel that sounded like I was having a go at you, sorry! It was a dig at the 'oh shut up and stop moaning' folk who for some reason feel compelled to respond in a completely unhelpful fashion when people dare to suggest they might be having a hard time.

DumpedWife, couldn't agree more, if we are going to do lockdown, we need to do what Wuhan did.

It will end, it will definitely end, just not quickly enough! We are all a bit fed up with the same old same old. however much we love our family, you can be fed up of them. I'm just glad I don't live alone and I worry about my friends who are and I try to contact them as much as I can. I think once schools go back, outdoor sport will return and then non essential shops and outdoor venues. The weather will warm up and pub gardens will open - rule of 6? It will seem like forever but we are nearly there. I had a blip a few days ago but am back on an even keel now. to those of you who are finding it difficult today.

I've spent a lot of today fighting the urge to self-harm (don't report me, I won't! I'm a veteran at this) because the news is just persistent and alarming. I have a 6yo who is autistic and a two year old and I have several chronic health conditions. All my definites, my support systems, have been pulled away from me. My son's entitled to be at school but it's patchy, staff off isolating, classes being consolidated, it's not the curriculum I fought the LA for at tribunal. My 2yo had childminder two days a week to give me time to recover from surgery and severe PTSD, that's gone. One of my go tos to stop me losing it completely was knowing that the NHS were only a phone call away, in an emergency. Now I'm scared to access services in case I contract COVID. (I did go for my smear test though).

My PTSD is related to trauma as a result of losing my mother, which I have now channeled into being terrified of doing the same to my kids and making them as fucked up as me. My health anxiety is so acute right now that if I could find a way to sell it I'd be a rich woman. I wake up and think 'Will it be today?' Every single day.

I put on as cheery a face as I can for everyone I love but inside I am completely broken.

I haven't seen my family in over six months, as they all live over 80 miles away. DH is working flat out to try and ensure we can eat/stay warm etc.

Phone counselling was shit. She kept telling me how I wasn't likely to die if I caught COVID. She had no access to my medical records so I don't know how she knew that with such certainty. She just made me feel an idiot.

My son is screaming at me for milk as I type this, I can't even get a thought out without being interrupted.

Someone on here mentioned the Brazilian variant.
I went to donate blood yesterday and the nurse doing my iron level test and checks asked me if I had heard of the Zika virus. I said that I had and how it affects pregnant women and how it started in Brazil. She just nodded , although I was a bit confused as I'm mid 50s and my child bearing days were over many years ago! Not sure if this is anything to do with covid or the Brazilian variant maybe? She didn't elaborate and there are questions about foreign travel on the forms etc so I assumed it was something to do with that? ( I've not been anywhere abroad on holiday in years!)

I'm so sorry O. P it's bloody hard and your sadness is warranted.
I feel the same somedays but I hang on for DD..... But I have black thoughts and have no idea where to go with them.

I was mentally prepared for life being groundhog day until the vaccine roll-out was adequate for restrictions to begin to be lifted but these new variants have sent me back to square one with 'oh god fingers crossed the vaccines still work, even a bit, against variants' otherwise do we all stay in lockdown whilst we just revaccinate the vulnerable over and over and over again.

But I know the clever scientists are on the case. Which is always reassuring.

You know what helps me on the hard days, and I don't know why but it does, is thinking about the time in the future where I'll be telling my son all about this crazy historic event that he was born during. When he knows nothing of not being able to hug his Gran or lockdowns and so on because that won't be life by then and he'll think how crazy it was that the world was like that for a little while when he was born.

Because we are living through history. It's so hard right now but this will end, the same as other pandemics and world events. Life will get better and we will one day be telling our future generations about the 2020/21 pandemic and how different life was and they wont be able to imagine it because it will have ended and life will have resumed and this will be another thing we look back on in history and think bloody hell, remember that!

@TwirpingBird

I think what many of the comments on this thread have shown is the media obsession with fear has worked. We are all utterly terrified of something that kills a tiny percentage of people, like it waiting outside our front gate will definitelyk kill us. Yes, it's bad for those people, but I think we have lost our perspective a little. We have all let it get a bit ..... out of focus. I think of someone said you had less than a 1% chance of dying when you got in your car to drive up the motorway, or when you cross the road, you would go anyway. We take lots of risks every day. This virus will inevitably become another one of those risks. Eradication isnt an option, so we will just have to accept it.

What about if someone told you that if you caught it you had a 1 in 10 chance of losing your job and having to live off disability benefits?

@BonnesVaccanes ..... eh .... then I would be worried .... but that's not my situation so I am not worried ...

I am not entirely sure what your point is.

Also don't lose sight of the fact that there absolutely is positive news out there. You have to search a little harder for it but that is not because it doesn't exist. The mainstream media love to fear monger, they don't want to report the positives but they do exist have a look around yourself, don't just rely on what news reporters are saying on the TV. Have a look at the Good News thread on here, there are lots of links and studies and data posted, all of which is really positive and can really improve your day I find.

@BonnesVacances you do know that if you have a car accident, or get cancer, or your DH dies, or you have a breakdown, or you have a heart attack, then you are at risk of those things happening? Thats always a possibility. Do you sit up worrying about all those things too, or just coronavirus?

[quote TwirpingBird]@BonnesVaccanes ..... eh .... then I would be worried .... but that's not my situation so I am not worried ...

I am not entirely sure what your point is. [/quote]
Just pointing out that you've trotted out the lazy stat of the risk from Covid as being less than 1% of dying. But that's not the whole picture as you haven't taken into account the risk of long term illness. It's like looking at the stats for dying in a car accident but not looking at how many have suffered life changing injuries. It might not change whether you get into a car which is fine, but it's just about looking at the whole picture. That's all.

[quote TwirpingBird]@BonnesVacances you do know that if you have a car accident, or get cancer, or your DH dies, or you have a breakdown, or you have a heart attack, then you are at risk of those things happening? Thats always a possibility. Do you sit up worrying about all those things too, or just coronavirus? [/quote]
No I just worry about my CV DD who's been bedbound since catching Covid 9 months ago and is on heart meds.

Nobody is saying you dont have the right to be worried @BonnesVacanes but not all of us have the same level risk from CV. There is no point in me pretending I am worried about something when I have very little reason to be. You have reason to be worried. I worry about other things, like the fact that my DD has never met her family, who doesnt know her grandparents, or my other DD who has spent half of her life in lockdown, seeing nobody, and I worry about how I can be a good mum and a mentally broken person. We all have our worries. We dont all have the same worries.

@TheDailyCarbunkle

Lockdown isn't a solution, it's a panic move that has catastrophic long term consequences. The fact that we're still using it as a 'measure' is beyond crazy. Saving some people by killing others is not, by any definition, a way to solve a problem. People are just as dead whether they're killed by covid or by lockdown. The really infuriating thing by lockdown is that the vast majority of people have every chance of coming out of covid just fine, but the only people who have any hope of escaping lockdown unscathed are the wealthy. Essentially it doesn't matter whether covid would affect you or not, you're fucked anyway because the measures to 'protect' you are instead screwing you and your children over in every way possible.

Eventually this nonsense will just have to stop. It should have stopped long ago, but that would have involved them admitting that the havoc they've wreaked on people's lives was for nothing and they're never going to do that. At the moment they're doubling down and doubling down, they're locked in the narrative that only covid matters. That will run out of steam eventually and there will be an acceptance that treating the human tendency to catch and transmit viruses as a massive moral failing punishable indefinitely by isolation is absolutely fucking batshit crazy.

The idea of 'staying safe' is by far the most evil one of our time. It is used to justify all sorts of pointless destruction and injustice. It's a psychological contagion. It will run its course. But the damage will last for a very very long time.

The really infuriating thing by lockdown is that the vast majority of people have every chance of coming out of covid just fine

So what about the vast number requiring hospitalisation? How would we maintain capacity for the treatment of other things? How would essential services continue to function in the event of widespread sickness in the population?

No one who says lockdown isn’t the right thing to do can ever offer a proposal for managing a virus with a R0 of >3 which is transmissible before it becomes symptomatic. Can you?

Well they haven't offered any proposal so far, in many many months of posting. The hospitalisation issue has always been completely ignored by that poster, in favour of sweeping, never backed up statements about how all restrictions are unnecessary and wrong, end of.

I'm done with it all. Teaching in a pandemic is absolute shite. I've had 24 children in my key worker bubble today which feels unsafe, parents complaining my zoom wasn't long enough (I was teaching my key worker bubble at the same time), endless interventions and micromanaging from SLT. Parents not uploading work to be marked in the right place then phoning the head to complain.

Nothing to look forward to. Get up, teach, do extra work, come home, cook, clean, put kids to bed, go to bed. Weekends full of rain and boredom. Nothing to talk about. Ugh.

@TheDailyCarbunkle

Lockdown isn't a solution, it's a panic move that has catastrophic long term consequences. The fact that we're still using it as a 'measure' is beyond crazy. Saving some people by killing others is not, by any definition, a way to solve a problem. People are just as dead whether they're killed by covid or by lockdown. The really infuriating thing by lockdown is that the vast majority of people have every chance of coming out of covid just fine, but the only people who have any hope of escaping lockdown unscathed are the wealthy. Essentially it doesn't matter whether covid would affect you or not, you're fucked anyway because the measures to 'protect' you are instead screwing you and your children over in every way possible.

Eventually this nonsense will just have to stop. It should have stopped long ago, but that would have involved them admitting that the havoc they've wreaked on people's lives was for nothing and they're never going to do that. At the moment they're doubling down and doubling down, they're locked in the narrative that only covid matters. That will run out of steam eventually and there will be an acceptance that treating the human tendency to catch and transmit viruses as a massive moral failing punishable indefinitely by isolation is absolutely fucking batshit crazy.

The idea of 'staying safe' is by far the most evil one of our time. It is used to justify all sorts of pointless destruction and injustice. It's a psychological contagion. It will run its course. But the damage will last for a very very long time.

👏👏👏 superb

God, people like TheDailyCarbunkle still don't understand the true function of the lockdowns, after nearly a year.

It's not about saving lives, it's about trying to space out deaths and illness over a longer period of time, giving us the chance to make sure the NHS doesn't fall over completely, and to develop treatments and vaccines. If we hadn't done this everything would have happened at a much faster rate over a much shorter period of time. That would have caused a far, far bigger catastrophe, economically, socially and psychologically, than we have now.

I’m just so tired. I feel drained of resilience and fight.

I never realised that all the rubbish stuff we took for granted before was actually so important.

Kids clubs, seeing family and friends etc so much of it I used to inwardly moan about. But all that stuff made our brains and hearts work and kept us feeling alive.

How have I only now realised this?

Of course one reason, for the government, is to save lives. It’s been part of their rhetoric right from the beginning. And as @TheDailyCarbunkle points out, it’s madness.

@NefretForth I feel the same and I am on medication ..... I am not depressed but if this continues I think I could be ....I don't want to live like this indefinitely which it feels like at the moment

I've never felt like this - ever.

Quite a few really, bad, horrible things have happened in my life - but this is the worst by far. I never thought I'd say that.

Does anyone else feel like they've been locked inside an airless box - with fake light and dry air. Even going for walks doesn't get rid of this feeling anymore.

I can't read or watch anything. I just work, home school my kids, eat, try to sleep. I feel like I'm sleep walking through every minute of every day.

Is that a common feeling? How do I snap out of it?