this talk: is about mental health, lockdown & writing - with Cassandra Campbell-Kemp
I have always been a square peg in a round hole, seeing the world through somehow different eyes and to most people appear as somewhat eccentric and weird. This became all the more apparent when, as the result of a terrifying nightmare, I knew that I had to take steps to protect myself and my cat from something really bad but I had no idea what.
I just knew that I had to make preparations and take stock of what I would need for an enforced and potentially long-term situation. The term Lockdown was only just emerging onto the world stage and I wondered what that would mean for us, here in Britain, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
I am single, 66 years old and pretty much immobile, so I’m confined to the house and rarely able to go out. To most people who thrive on social interaction this would seem to be anathema, but to me, the solitary life that I had been forced into leading seemed to have equipped me with the attitudes and mechanisms to cope and survive. Alone. For an unspecified period of time.
I knew my physical limits, I didn’t yet know my mental ones but I come from a generation whose parents lived through the Second World War and who had, with the typical British stiff upper lip, ‘just got on with it’. I did know that moaning about my situation would do nothing to alleviate my concerns. My friends were also frightened and anxious and rightly focussing on their own situation. So I mentally stiffened my lip, girded my loins and started preparing for a siege. Literally.
Realising that the everyday things we took for granted might become hard to get. I threw myself into a frenzy of planning and hit the Internet. Amazon and EBay rapidly became my life savers and, a month before the British Government started talking about Lockdown, I had already amassed a huge pile of long-life and dehydrated foodstuffs. God only knows what I was going to do with them for I am a terrible cook, but the planning, strategising and implementation of creating my survival bubble kept me from whimpering with fear, howling with self pity and frightening the cat.
It was obvious that if I didn’t help myself I was going to get into serious trouble and the likelihood of not being able to call for help was sobering. For we were all in the same boat - in the midst of an unprecedented situation and only those who were old enough to have lived during the last War knew how to cope. With stoicism and pragmatism. Thus I channelled my inner Resourceful Old Bat and looked at the situation objectively. What would I advise someone in my predicament to do? Having found the answer, I proceeded to implement my own advice.
There were times when I had serious wobbles and dissolved into tears of desperation and helplessness but I had done most of the planning and equipped myself with what I reckoned I’d needed. My fears were that I would actually find myself the last person standing and would have to survive on what I had in my stores. Being disabled meant that if the bodies were piling high in the streets, I’d have no chance. However the strength and determination to survive at all costs revealed reserves of bloody-minded determination I didn’t know I had. I have few friends, but they are good friends and all of them were scared.
Talking to them, I realised that my experiences of fledgling self-survival might actually be of some help to them, so I wrote a long blog on Facebook which elicited the most extraordinary response. I was advised to make it a public post (not just for friends) as it contained some of the nuggets of wisdom I had unearthed during my logistical escapades. Not least recounting my experiences as to how I was approaching the whole thing from the viewpoint of my own safety - and sanity.
The blog morphed into the beginnings of a book. A book that was soon charting my trials and tribulations, adventures and mishaps, together with the sometimes worrying mood swings. Writing it felt oddly self- indulgent but it was also very liberating and so I ploughed on. I rediscovered my somewhat black sense of humour replete with moments of helpless laughter as I found myself in ridiculous situations at home from which extricating myself would prove to be challenging.
There were days when I was really really angry, and days when I was in floods of tears. For several weeks my personal and domestic hygiene plummeted. I learnt to ride the mood swings, I had my first panic attack and was convinced that I was dying. On the plus side I learnt to laugh at myself and not to take the whole Pandemic thing so seriously. There was nothing I could do about it so I just carried on in my self-constructed ivory tower. Which became my coping mechanism, along with a daily glass or two of wine - having found that Aldi delivered organic cases at very reasonable prices!
I discovered that I really enjoyed writing and the emergence of the book was hugely cathartic. I was surprised by my mental strength and stoicism and, by having written about and owned my ‘differences’, my eccentricities, I no longer felt stigmatised by them - the epiphany came when I realised that I actually didn’t care what people thought of me. I lost some old friends, but in doing so realised how lucky I was to have those that remained. We laughed and cried together on FaceTime, Messenger etc and that was sufficient to keep me feeling connected.
Now, looking back, my overwhelming feeling is that despite the unprecedented situation, I had never been happier or more in tune with myself. Interesting that.