Not a covid diary

This is the sort of thing I've been sharing on Facebook.

You probably haven’t noticed, because you’ve got your own lives, but I haven’t been here for the last three months.

I’ve been on Twitter, reporting racists. I’ve been on Facebook, joining groups for freelances who’ve lost work through the lockdown. And telling my friends, who know how shit the government is, how shit the government is.

But it didn’t feel right to be blogging. What was there to say? The small stuff is actually quite boring; the big stuff is too big to go there.

We’ve all got our covid diaries, but I doubt that mine is much different from yours so you don’t need me to share it. We’ve all worried about the same things, slept too much, eaten too much, struggled with whatever circumstances we’ve found ourselves in. Some of us have suffered more than others.

I’ve been lucky, so far. I’ve only suffered from lockdown. And three months in, I can look back and see how things have changed. It feels like A Journey.

Remember when we worried about toilet paper? That’s stopped being a problem now. (I bulk-buy from Who Gives A Crap anyway. They’re great.)

Remember when we were all going to read books and learn new things, and then found out we were too traumatised to do it? And then someone pointed out that we were at the bottom of the Hierarchy of Needs (survival) and that the stuff at the top (self-realisation) wasn’t really on the cards. I sighed with relief and went back to bed.

But in the last few weeks, I’ve started reading again. And I’ve started learning new things. I found some work-related courses (free!) on FutureLearn. And I found a comedy course from Funny Women.

One hour every day for a week, with around 20 other women, on Zoom. An interesting group that included a disabled lesbian (make your own joke; she did), a Marilyn Monroe impersonator and a woman who reviews sex toys for a living. Well, I hope it’s for a living.

I learnt a few things from the course. That Zoom makes me shyer than usual. That a lot of women have much dirtier minds than me. That even though I was once a show-off, I don’t want to be a performer.

So if I want to be heard, I still need to write things down. This blog is where I belong if I want to talk to people. I might do some more book reviews, now that I’m reading again. I might have a rant about racists. I probably won’t write about covid again.

Right now, I can’t actually imagine the future, and that’s a bit scary. But I hope that here is where I’ll be.