Anyone else struggling to get past the last two years?

[sachaf08]

Now that it’s coming up to two years since this all started, I’ve realised I STILL haven’t processed any of it properly.

I don’t really know how to put into words how I feel- it’s almost like a part of me is always going to be waiting for someone in March 2020 to tell me it’s all fine, the pandemic is over now, we don’t need to have a lockdown. I guess I’m just struggling to move past it mentally? I find myself thinking back to the early days of the pandemic a lot and I think it’s because my brain is still trying to process it all.

I also had an unplanned pregnancy which started in the first lockdown- DD is 1 now- and I found a lot of that pregnancy v stressful trying to avoid covid, not to mention the birth itself being less than pleasant partly due to covid rules. I think I’ve maybe got a bit of unresolved trauma or something around this too.

I’m pretty much fine day to day, happy to be getting out and doing things again.Very grateful to still have my job. In fact there’s such a lot I have to be grateful for and I know that many people have suffered horribly in many different ways over the last two years. But I just cannot stop rehashing it all in my head?! Please tell me that I’m not crazy and that I will eventually be able to ‘move on’

It's easy to overlook just how unsettling and jarring the past two years have been. Even in Spring 2020, the pessimists wouldn't have thought it would play out like it has.

I'm sure things will return to normal... they always are in so many ways, and Covid's grip in our lives js steadily loosening, and you'll return to your 2019 self

I find it shocking we are in2022 it doesn’t feel like we finished 2020. Life move on and changed but somethings didn’t. I can’t explain it but yes I get the whole not dealing with the trauma I guess we still don’t feel like we can move on.

If you can access it, I'd try and get some therapy to help you move on. I've had plenty for PTSD over something entirely different, and right at the start of the pandemic I was very concerned for people experiencing the trauma with no support. I could recognise some of the same feelings, but luckily was equipped to recognise and deal with it. Not that I'm suggesting you have PTSD at all, but trauma/stress it would help to talk over seems very likely in so many. I worry about a lot of unresolved mental health scarring going forward. Your feelings make complete sense to me. Even if it's self help, I'd work through those feelings

I think it is really hard to 'get over' something that isn't over. Every time things seem to be coming good, or there's a lull, a new wave occurs...

You are definitely not alone in feeling traumatised and left uncertain of your footing, after these last couple of years.

I didn't realize it's been nearly 2 years wow!

I'm hopeful we will all be able to move on from this once things become more 'normal'. At the moment we still have to isolate etc so it still feels like it's here.

My personal timeline has gone tits up. I had to work out an ‘18 month ago’ scenario and it took ages to work out where that took me back to. It’s often as if 2021 just didn’t happen at all. I also lost both parents in the year before all of this and I know my own grieving process became kind of disrupted /mixed in with it all. Think I had massive overreaction when it all started

I think that it has gone on too long for people to get over it. By now most people will have had life events that will have been disrupted by the pandemic - illness, grief, stages of bringing up children, life on hold.

That is why Downing Street’s behaviour is causing so much distress.

I'm not over it because it isn't over.

The best would be that it becomes something that we can all acknowledge and are able to live with.

I think its quite normal to feel a bit traumatised.

So much has happened in the last two years. Not more than in any other two years, and not directly as a result of covid. However everything that has happened, good and bad will be forever thought of as resulting from or tainted by Covid. I've had life changing events, made life changing decisions and this was inevitable but the timing means all memories of theses events will be forever linked to covid in my memory. I've moved house, I hate the house, I've changed jobs, I don't like my job, I earn more but I don't appreciate it, I'm surrounded by people but I often want to "go home" but can't because home but it's not my home anymore, I have made plans......two years too late and feel old. Really old. I feel robbed of two years of life. I feel I went into the pandemic full of energy and optimism and I'm emerging from it older and a bit stuck.

I have always thought there would be a sort of collective trauma.

I feel like this too. Overnight I lost my business, had no financial support from the government, everything I loved doing taken away (I HATE staying at home - all those ‘stay home & watch Netflix’ people can duck right off), kids stuff all gone & had them both at home for months on end (neither in the years that got to go back to school early), felt panicked, lonely, isolated. I’m still not over it. I still hate the world and what it did to people - all the ridiculous paranoia (people ducking into hedges when you walked past), roping off of kids’ playgrounds, dobbing people in on Facebook groups for daring to sit on a bench with a friend or drive out of their village for a different walk (BUT WHAT IF YOU CRASH THE CAR ON THE WAY THERE?!!) - people well & truly lost their minds and it’s made me hate everyone.

Sorry OP I can’t help, but I do know how you feel. I’m still not over it… hopefully one day I’ll come round but at the moment I still can’t process any of it fully.

Me.

I'm struggling to socialise, if I get invited out I get anxious. I'm used to going to work then just coming home.

My daughter is pretty much the same. She's gone fro being a happy social butterfly to a nervous wreck. She's lost so much weight. She's also lost 3 friends since the pandemic began to suicide. They were all 14

You're not crazy. IMO, your reaction is the opposite of crazy. It's important to process this stuff. I went through the whole two years thinking: Oh, we've not had it so bad. None of us got ill. No one we know died of Covid. It's only now that things return to normal-ish that I can deal with the fact that my dad lay alone in hospital for months of the last year of his life, without his wife even being allowed to visit, let alone any of us. Or that DS was so isolated in his first term at uni that he ended up terrifyingly depressed, with anorexia and still struggles with the shadow of that time now.

I was chatting with a friend the other day, and she told me that among her team of five colleagues, four of them have DC with severe MH issues. The toll on us all has been appalling, and we need to do something to combat it.

It must have been incredibly scary for you to be pregnant and bring a baby into the world at that time. But you've done it, and your child is safely born and turned one. That is a good thing to have come out of the pandemic.

Offload here, OP. I think we all need to talk about this stuff. It's interesting. I've found that over the past couple of weeks I am just starting to discuss the toll it has taken on us all with friends. It's so helpful.

@Toadsinholes

I feel like this too. Overnight I lost my business, had no financial support from the government, everything I loved doing taken away (I HATE staying at home - all those ‘stay home & watch Netflix’ people can duck right off), kids stuff all gone & had them both at home for months on end (neither in the years that got to go back to school early), felt panicked, lonely, isolated. I’m still not over it. I still hate the world and what it did to people - all the ridiculous paranoia (people ducking into hedges when you walked past), roping off of kids’ playgrounds, dobbing people in on Facebook groups for daring to sit on a bench with a friend or drive out of their village for a different walk (BUT WHAT IF YOU CRASH THE CAR ON THE WAY THERE?!!) - people well & truly lost their minds and it’s made me hate everyone.

Sorry OP I can’t help, but I do know how you feel. I’m still not over it… hopefully one day I’ll come round but at the moment I still can’t process any of it fully.

I think it's important for someone who had the experience you had to chat here with people who feel the same as you. The roped off playgrounds, the zeal with which people reported neighbours for humane infringements of ridiculous laws. I remember walking in the woods early on when we weren't even allowed to sit alone (remember that?) I saw a woman I know slightly sitting on a fallen log and she looked so terrified when she saw me catching her breaking the law. I just smiled and waved, but still remember it. We have lived through insane, mismanaged, deeply inhumane times and we need to talk about them.

What gets me is the people who are hurriedly rewriting early to mid 2020 especially and claiming that some of the more extreme stuff never happened. Makes you feel like you’re being gaslit.

Collective trauma is a good summation of it, definitely.

Yes I totally understand how anxiety ridden these past couple of years have been :(
What I really worry about is how all our children have been affected. Their little minds must be shot! I have 14,10,8 and 17 month old girls. My 3 older girls have had the childhood totally ripped apart.. they can’t do anything without having covid in the back of their mindsz my 17 month old has been affected too, and whilst she is a happy little baby I do feel she has missed out on a lot in her short life.

Our poor children :(

Apologies for the lack of punctuation and the spelling mistakes on that last post. Currently dealing with having covid myself and very knackered from the rubbish night sleep I’ve had.

We had it relatively easy (did watch a lot of Netflix, sorry pp) but it still feels unreal.
When I was sent to wfh the first week I thought yippee and expected it to last a week or two. Never thought it would be a month even.
Even now I can't think about it properly - still in the "keep your head down and get through this" mode.

I live in a constant state of “Oh good God, what next?” because the last two years has been a case of if it can get worse, it will get worse. It’s almost like this trauma bond I’ve developed with the pandemic and there’s nothing I can do to shake it.

Like others, I am self-employed and my business ground to a halt overnight. I was ineligible for any government support and just left to flounder. My partner of 3 years left me without a word of explanation (bought a house behind my back!), then I got with my current partner and had an unplanned ectopic pregnancy. The pandemic meant I had to sit alone in a hospital room losing my child as I couldn’t have anyone with me.

The horrors I’ve experienced in the last 2 years that have either been caused by or made worse by the pandemic means I now live in a constant state of fear that it could all happen again.

I’m pregnant again (29 weeks now) and my partner and I can’t wait to welcome our baby into the world but my constant fears cast a shadow over everything it has to be said.

I'm now frightened of the government. Always at the back of my mind there's that fear of what are they going to do to us next. I think it will take a long time to feel safe again.

One of the worst things is looking at pictures of my children from the time just before and realising how little they were, only 2 and 4!

I feel better as normality approaches and more freedoms come back.

Losing the legal basis after two years will likely happen too

hi OP, I would strongly advise against watching or reading the news where possible. I think it's instrumental in the trauma and anxiety people feel about the pandemic. Maybe check in with headlines every few days online. But watching the rolling reports is seriously bad for people's mental health and perpetuates the anxiety. I think one of the reasons I have been able to process it all is due to avoiding TV news and focussing on my own life. I'm not caught up in the never ending cycle of drama that it perpetuates. Not to say that some of it isn't important but the vast majority of it is not helpful to your personal situation. And if you do stop watching, make sure it's longer term and not just for a week or two.

I’m still wrestling with long Covid (22 months and counting) after being hospitalised right at the start of the pandemic.
I can’t “move on” as such, as my breathlessness and fatigue are ever present.
But I am grateful that I survived, and try to just enjoy improvements as social activities reopen, life becomes a bit more normal etc.
Living alone for two years in semi isolation while ill was pretty awful, but I really don’t want to dwell on it. Let’s all look forward not back, and count whatever blessings we still have.

@Harlequin1088, wishing you the best of luck and sending you love and strength.
❤

@Lemonweightloss Thank you, that’s very kind.