@Gguin
For me the saddest thing is what it has done to people and to friendships. The standard issue line is "but I've made loads of new friends online/I was never bothered about others anyway and am happy with my family/I have seen more of my BFF in Australia than ever thanks for Zoom"
My reality is I've felt friendships fall into disrepair due to lack of contact nor anything to talk about. The place I live has become a curtain twitching hellhole and my automatic reaction when I see someone I don't know is suspicion or anger instead of curiosity of warmth.
I HATED some of the stuff that was posted on here at the peak of lockdown. The WW2 comparisons, the "stay the fuck at home", this way in which the NHS was emotionally weaponised as a tool to try to prevent anyone anywhere from feeling a single other thought than sourdough-tinted gratefulness.
There were days I'd wake at 8 or 9 then think that's no good I need to use up more of the day so go back and stay in bed until 5pm. I honestly began to wonder if a post 2020 life was going to be worth sticking around for. I hated the government. I hated the stupid TV programmes. I hated the awful FB groups. I hated so hard that I still don't know if it's possible to ever experience any emotion that intense, so anything else feels grey.
Some amazing posts here and I'm genuinely interested in hearing people's heartfelt stories.
This one resonates strongly.
DM seems to have no desire to see me and my family anymore. Bubbles pushed her and DB together as in March 2020 she was recovering from illness including a nasty "chest infection" aquired in hospital... she still feels lousy from cumulative delayed and delayed treatment pre-dating Covid, and CBA to see my children. I'm not a million miles away, but it's not pop-in distance either and takes a couple of hours visit to justify the drive. It's now 2 years since she saw them.
They haven't seen their other granny in over 2 years. She's in another country and while we did travel over in the summer, only DH could book 2x 30 min appointments to see her as at that point she was in a care home.
The added imposed fear and restrictions made life far harder and more isolated in 2020. My friends wouldn't meet until late Aug 2020. My children hardly played with another child in 6 months. They forgot how to play because they had no social stimulation. I did my best, but I'm not a 7/ 9 yo boy. I can not meet their every need (and God knows I can't even teach them...) by June 2020, DS2 would lie on my bed staring vacantly at the TV and he became beligerent and angry. He was depressed. That was the point I started jumping fences into playgrounds to try and stimulate them. There was one corner of the playground of a nearby village that had a sensor that would put out a message about tresspassing and the Police being called. I don't know if it was put into the playground or overlapped from the building site through the hedge, but I haven't heard it since the playground reopened it. I let my children play despite the monotonous voice threatening the Police.
Last winter on a rare sunny day, I drove them out to a wasted rec, a piece of tarmac edged with brambles, dog shit and broken glass. It was the only place I could think of where they could run around without slithering into clay mud that had not been chained up. In January it was so difficult to get the DCs out into daylight around the fucking "home learning" (aka sobbing into mummy's lap/ melting down) as there was nowhere on the doorstep to go thanks to the clay swamp of our neighbourhood, including our small, easily trampled garden. A lot of last winter, I wanted to passively not exist.
For much of March 2020 to September 2021 I lost my external purposes in life. I was reduced to servicing my household. Some purposes and contacts came back briefly and were mucked about with the Tiers. The uncertainty of the Tiers was very unsettling and damaging. In May there was an AIBU about "feeling flat" a lot like this thread, and although restrictions were easing, many peoples' minds had gone numb to the excitement of anticipation lest it be stolen away from them again.
I also find masks incredibly depressing and isolating. You escape from the tedium of your home into a faceless, expressionless void where communication is muffled out and unreadable. Then there's the fear of the self-appointed mask police.
I've had far far easier bereavements and that's including the premature loss of two relatives I grew up with. Normally I cope by immersing myself in the distractions of life but there is no distraction and escape from the Covid world. It permeates nearly everything.
In the grand scheme of things, the damage to our family has not been severe, but it matters to me, and from the start when MNers deemed you could only care about Covid deaths, I spoke up for the people who still cared about other things in life. New mums and children/ young people have been treated abominably for little gain. The bereaved (whatever the cause) have lost essential support. Universities treated students abysmally. The people in need of greatest care have been isolated away and deprived of human touch, faces, care and relationships.
There are fates far far worse than Covid.
And all the talk of bodies in the streets and children losing parents (demographically unlikely on a mass scale) and being repeatedly told I'm selfish for not caring about Covid enough; when I was a child, my dad did literally die in the street. He went out to work and never came home. They didn't have defribulators then.
Coz Covid means even more than ever that myself and my immediate family comes first, because very, very few other people will give a shit. How can I care about strangers when my loved ones are out of reach? How can I care about communities when they're shut off, broken up and masked? I'm not the selfish one asking other people to sacrifice their way of life for me. I just want to live a real normal with human contact.