Well, this is taking a while, isn't it?

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Now more than ever, we need to look after not only our mental health, but that of others too

Well, this is taking a while, isn't it? 

I don’t know how many of us expected lockdown to last this long. When my colleagues and I left the office in March, the scientific part of my brain didn’t expect to be back in there until at least June. But a softer side of my brain wanted to cling to the reassuring idea of ‘just be a few weeks.’

I’ve been working from home for two months now. For much of that time, working from home has meant working from hometown. I’ve still got my ‘grown-up job,’ but I’m sleeping in the bed I slept in as a teenager. So far, it’s been good – apart from when I had to suspend a new office buddy for misconduct. I could tolerate Jake jumping on the keyboard when all it meant was that his totally adorable face overshadowed any of my contributions in video meetings. But I had to take action, unfortunately, when he and a colleague’s cat tried to start a fight via our respective screens.

It wasn’t expected or planned that I would come back here – but neither was a global pandemic. I have a medical condition, and when this started, it meant extra vigilance, but not extra anxiety. It’s been a few years since I last worked in a lab, but the practice of preventing contamination left me with some useful skills – even if I never expected to need them on the tube. I can still open doors with my elbows, get through tasks without touching much, still know how to wash my hands more thoroughly than most of us normally would. But the situation did escalate, as we all know, and because I rely on regular activity to keep my health strong, a lockdown in a gardenless flat became a source of worry in its own right. Living on the fourth floor, I wasn’t sure that a Joe Wicks work-out out was going to, well, work out.

It felt strange and unsettling to walk away from my normal life without a return date, but I’m extremely lucky to have been able to travel back to Ireland pre-lockdown, and to be able to wait things out here. It’s great to be able to spend an extended period of time with my family, and we’re lucky to have space around us. My brother also came back from the UK and is working from here. When he does burpees in the garden, his former training companion loyally tries to join in, even though their training partnership officially ended some time ago. Their goals were no longer compatible. Django has less energy than he used to and prefers to amble around the garden with a bone; Ciarán’s still going to the forest for hill sprints.

We’re all still taking precautions when we go out for essentials, but infection is unlikely. Our nearest neighbours are quite blatantly flouting social distancing, but there’s nothing we can do about that: the rules are a bit woolly when it comes to reporting sheep to the authorities.

This being a running club blog, I should probably mention my own running. I’m a permanent beginner, and if you asked me to which of the club’s activities I’m most naturally suited, it would be drinking wine. Saturday mornings are one of my London highlights, but in larger Serpie groups, I sometimes feel the need to declare myself a running club imposter before anyone else does. Of course, no one has – but I wanted to mention that feeling in case anyone else feels the same, in the hope that knowing they won’t be alone in it will help them work up the nerve to join, or to come back. Because a running club is daunting to those of us who aren’t natural athletes, but it has been really good.

In lockdown Ireland, I’m running even less than usual. I’d like to say it’s culturally conditioned cowardice, but, in all honesty, I’m just a wimp. The first thing they do to you in a rural Irish primary school is teach you An bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithreas? (It means ‘Can I go to the toilet?’ and is about the only fragment of the native language that most modern Irish memories can be expected to retain into adulthood). The second thing they do is start instilling a fear of farm machinery. The road just outside is still busy with passing tractors and trucks, and I really don’t like the idea of running on it. So I’ve been cycling further away and doing shorter runs, hopefully balanced by more  bike time. It’s enough to keep my physical and mental resilience up.

And this is a time where we need resilience. Whether it applies work in the sense of a job or not, the line that “you’re not working from home – you’re at home during a crisis, trying to work,” is a valuable one.

I’m aware of how lucky I am personally in that I’m still working (especially as I’m not caring for or home schooling children!), and I’m really glad – or maybe relieved is the better word – that the cancer research charity I work at has been able to keep achieving everything that can be achieved. Cancer research can’t stop and we’ve had to work hard to keep as much of it going whilst the scientists on our books socially distance, and we come to terms with the fact that we don’t know when we can run events again. But it has been a frustrating time: I would guess that most of us who are still working are dealing with something similar: you have to switch from being proactive to spending a lot of the time reacting, to things like Boris and a virus, which are completely out of your control. And while I don’t miss the proximity to strangers’ armpits or the slow-shuffling crowds into central London stations, I have been missing the clean break between work and home that my commute gave me. 

I think all of this is behind the serious doses of screen fatigue I’ve been feeling some days. During lockdown, I’ve often had more time, but not necessarily any more energy. I’ve often looked forward to online social things in advance, only to find on the day that, after a long day in front of the computer, the last thing I wanted was more time in front of that same screen. And to come back to the “in a crisis, trying to work” thought – these are stressful times. Having more time doesn’t mean we should necessarily expect to have a lot more energy, or more capacity to get a lot of things done. And for a whole host of reasons, I don’t like video calls much: online meetings wear me out much more than the real thing.

I’m a sociable introvert. I like spending time with people, but I’m also happy spending time alone. Normally, I try to keep the two things in balance, but when lockdown started, I found it hard to say no to anything. We normally make plans with the understanding that everyone has other commitments, so we can rearrange things relatively easily. Now that we know we’re not going anywhere, it’s so easy to slip in the habit of confusing ‘not going anywhere’ with ‘nothing going on.’

In some ways, lockdown has probably just been the next step in something started by mobile phones and continued by smartphones. But you don’t have to be available, just because you’re at home. In all honesty, you’re probably not available much. There are things to be done, meals to be made, possibly children to be home-schooled – and sometimes, online socials end up clashing with other online socials. Even then, we should try to protect some do-nothing, resting time if we can. But this isn't easy, because everyone’s lockdown is different, and everyone has different needs. There are people who live alone, or who have been furloughed, people who need a lot of social contact. And there are people more like me, for whom self-care means stepping away from computer and phone for the evening.

So I may see you soon on online social, or I may not. But either way, I really do hope that all of you are keeping as well and content as can be expected in these very strange days.