Has lockdown revealed your worse self, best self, or neither really, mate

[Better Midlands]

It's killed my social skills, my career, my will to create, my trust in other human beings and my self-confidence.

Yep.

[garbed_attic]

It's weird. In some respects I'm doing much better than I was pre-lockdown, but I don't think I like myself as much. I feel like the issue is less to do with lockdown and more to do with parenthood tbh. I didn't really have any expectations of myself before I became a parent, other than to avoid becoming homeless, seriously hurting anyone, or dying at a young age due to my own carelessness or negligence. Now I have much greater expectations of what my son's dad should be like, so I do much better than I used to, but I don't reach my expectations so I don't like myself.

I find this very relatable! I've gone from never thinking I'd have kids, to having two stepkids. Moving in together at the start of the first lockdown means this has been a steep learning curve for me.

[The Ombudsman]

Very sorry to hear that. If it's this infuriating for those of us who haven't been directly affected, I can't imagine what it's like for you. Every time this happened, it was a stranger on the street. One of them was shouting it at everyone who walked past.

Thanks. It's been shit really.

Sorry to hear you getting this sort of abuse. Not experienced anything like that, meaning abuse to those wearing masks. Someone laughed at me wearing a mask in the car, but the thing is if I don't have it on when I leave the house, I know I'll get to where I'm going and have forgotten it.

[imitationleather]

My mental health has probably never been better. Not sure if it's because of lockdown or if I have just generally sorted myself out. When I take stock of how my life has changed in comparison to eighteen or so months ago I conclude it's probably a mixture of both.

When I think of stuff reopening and all the assorted pressures of life returning I do feel pretty anxious.

[purlieu]

It's made me realise just how fucking alone I am in my life. Last March I actually thought "at least everyone else is in the same situation as me now" and then everything cut to people talking about / posting pictures of their group Zoom chats and stuff and showed me that, even when nobody is allowed to see anyone, I'm still several rungs down the social ladder in comparison to a lot of people I know, having only two people I speak to on a regular basis (apart from my parents). My mental health has been a staggering low for the past few months and the only thing that stopped me from attempting suicide fairly recently was the thought that, successful or not, I'd end up in hospital, and I don't want my parents and girlfriend to heighten their risk of getting Covid.

So yeah, it's been great.

[H-O-W-L]

I've suffered far greater than I ever have in my life but I think I'm at a level of mental and intellectual balance now that I couldn't have reached without the return to isolation. It's done hell for my anxiety but it's also made me so much better in other ways. It's fucking weird.

[Icehaven]

It's killed my social skills, my career, my will to create, my trust in other human beings and my self-confidence. So that'll be "worst self".

Replace 'career' with 'general health' and same here. The combination of the last year and hitting my early 40s has left me more fearful and insecure about the future than I ever thought I'd feel. Really have that psychological sense now that the best has passed, everything's only going to start to decline, there's a lot of things I'm probably never going to do and it's just generally too late to steer life in any of the directions I thought it would have just fallen into by now. I know people joke about it 'all being downhill from here' but when you genuinely feel like that it's fucking terrifying. I've never exactly been an optimist but at least I used to be able to hope the future would be fine, and better, because it was a long way away, but now it feels like it's nearly here, and it isn't fine, and I can't see how it will be.

I'm just hoping once the distraction of being able to do things and go out and about again returns and I don't have as much time to dwell I'll get some confidence and enjoyment of life back, but fuck knows. Something I've had a few discussions about is how this last year has shown that if you haven't enormously missed doing things that we've always done, like celebrate birthdays and Christmas etc., go out to pubs and restaurants, go to gigs and festivals, visit museums and art galleries, travel, all that stuff, then you're left questioning why you did it in the first place, and did you even enjoy it? I suppose there's a difference between missing out when there's actually things to do, and having nothing to miss because nothing's happening, but I have to stop my natural tendency towards apathy turning into full-on not bothering to do anything or go anywhere because it's become the norm. I've been trying to think about going away as that's been one of the few things I've genuinely ''looked forward'' to doing but as with everything else I'm so used to uncertainty and so out of the habit of making any kind of plans it just seems insurmountable and like something from another time/life (which it still kind of is.) However if this is what having a small, repetitive world does to my brain then I'm going to have to kick myself up the arse and get out there or I'll go down completely.

I dunno, I'll/we'll hopefully (ha!) look back on threads like this and not recognise the feeling in a few years, but ironically the inertia of the last 12 months makes it hard to remember what it was like to feel any different.



tldr; 41 year old teenager whinges about Covid year highlighting life's fleeting pointlessness.

[flotemysost]

Last March I actually thought "at least everyone else is in the same situation as me now" and then everything cut to people talking about / posting pictures of their group Zoom chats and stuff and showed me that, even when nobody is allowed to see anyone, I'm still several rungs down the social ladder in comparison to a lot of people I know

I'm sure this was actually a really common response in the March 2020 lockdown, more common than people are letting on, probably. I definitely had moments of feeling like a complete pathetic unlikeable loser because everyone else I know seemed to immediately have a rammed diary with constant Zoom calls and quizzes, or doing fun bonding activities with their flatmates (whereas I'd sometimes go for days without talking to mine).

I think it's important to remember that this was (and still is) such a new, bizarre, artificial situation - I think back then, it was all too easy to spiral into thinking that this was somehow proof of who the genuinely popular, likeable people were, once the trappings of normal life and circumstantial interactions were stripped away - but in reality it's anything but that. Any boring twat can post a screen shot of them and several other boring twats cheerily holding cans aloft on a Zoom grid, doesn't mean they're any more fun or interesting than they were before lockdown.

Most of these people were most likely bored/lonely/scared/angry/depressed for a lot of that time as well, and one of my friends who appeared (from Instagram) to be really chummy with her flatmates admitted she wanted to murder them after the first week or two. And god save me from another fucking online quiz, the few I did end up joining were plenty.

Sorry you're struggling anyway, I hope you can get to feeling in a better place.

[peanutbutter]

another thing I've noticed over the pandemic which may be related is that Dublin has gone from having a major heroin problem to having a major heroin and crack problem.

Noticed the same in a few places in recent years. First time I was in the US a local had to explain to me that I was talking to a crack addict one time instead of just a very talky local eccentric.

I've heard the purity of cocaine has shot up since the dark web became a thing. Assume a knock on effect of this  is that it's suddenly a lot easier to get cocaine with purity as far as Ireland and the UK that crack can be made from.

[checkoutgirl]

Really have that psychological sense now that the best has passed, everything's only going to start to decline

Yeah, I have that. This feeling I can't shake that I'm 42 and the future potential then is now the present time now with no potential. Like if I was going to be successful I would have done it by now but I didn't and I'm about to be fired after pissing away 7 years with this company that doesn't pay well and doesn't give a fuck about me anyway.

And what jobs are even out there now? Covid tracer? Call centre? At 42? Urgh!

We're all becoming a million little Travis Bickles.

"The days go on and on... they don't end. All my life needed was a sense of someplace to go. I don't believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention, I believe that one should become a person like other people."

[garbed_attic]

Yeah, I have that. This feeling I can't shake that I'm 42 and the future potential then is now the present time now with no potential. Like if I was going to be successful I would have done it by now but I didn't and I'm about to be fired after pissing away 7 years with this company that doesn't pay well and doesn't give a fuck about me anyway.

And what jobs are even out there now? Covid tracer? Call centre? At 42? Urgh!

Literally being interviewed for this on Friday. Though, to be fair, I lost/left my job trying to move to the Netherlands to escape Brexit at the end of last year.

[Dirty Boy]

tldr; 41 year old teenager whinges about Covid year highlighting life's fleeting pointlessness.

This was very relatable. I'm a bit younger than you, but i've been having this more and more as well, especially in the early hours if i'm unlucky enough to be awake. It's not so much a recent thing to do with lockdown as i'm completely alone and isolated anyway, so in that regard it's been no real change, but i've been dealing with the same major issues regarding self-worth, anxiety and depression for over 20 years now and it's harder to hope for some small change or uptick in circumstances when you're staring down the barrel of middle age and you still feel like a shitty awkward teenage misanthrope. I'm thinking medication must at least be keeping me from staring fully into the abyss as i can just about cope most days, but these thoughts are definitley getting harder to push away the older i get.

Bit depressing sorry.

[purlieu]

I'm sure this was actually a really common response in the March 2020 lockdown, more common than people are letting on, probably. I definitely had moments of feeling like a complete pathetic unlikeable loser because everyone else I know seemed to immediately have a rammed diary with constant Zoom calls and quizzes, or doing fun bonding activities with their flatmates (whereas I'd sometimes go for days without talking to mine).

I think it's important to remember that this was (and still is) such a new, bizarre, artificial situation - I think back then, it was all too easy to spiral into thinking that this was somehow proof of who the genuinely popular, likeable people were, once the trappings of normal life and circumstantial interactions were stripped away - but in reality it's anything but that. Any boring twat can post a screen shot of them and several other boring twats cheerily holding cans aloft on a Zoom grid, doesn't mean they're any more fun or interesting than they were before lockdown.

Most of these people were most likely bored/lonely/scared/angry/depressed for a lot of that time as well, and one of my friends who appeared (from Instagram) to be really chummy with her flatmates admitted she wanted to murder them after the first week or two. And god save me from another fucking online quiz, the few I did end up joining were plenty.

Sorry you're struggling anyway, I hope you can get to feeling in a better place.

The thing that got me the most is that I don't have people to Zoom, let alone an actual group of people. At one point I actually had a reasonably active social circle, and seeing people on Zoom just felt like quite a visceral reminder that I no longer even know, say, four people who I could talk to all at once. My social life for the past few years has basically been my girlfriend, and chattering to shoulders?-stomach! about beer on Facebook messenger.

Anyway yes, woe is me, blah blah. I'm just more determined than ever to fucking sort this shitfest of a life out once I feel confident starting to apply for jobs and such again.

[dissolute ocelot]

Even as someone who can take weird pride and excitement in the suffering and failures of my employers and even myself (ooh, redundancy, how exciting, I've never done that before; why aren't there wars these days like my grandparents had? I've always wanted a vermin infestation...), it's long ago passed the point where it seemed like any kind of adventure.

Just wishing for exciting new ways to fuck up, basically.