Back at the being of pandemic lockdown I was scared to a point of being frozen emotionally and physically. I kept within the guidelines but missed the immediate availability of  some of my friends.

A planned trip to London to see a friend, the first trip since the previous September, was called off less than two weeks before lockdown began. I’d had a really severe cold and my GP said I was probably vulnerable and it wasn’t worth the risk. Given the current information we have about symptoms and the way the illness progresses it is very likely that I had the virus.

Like most people I’ve stumbled through the seven month since the beginning of lockdown in a haze and the government has turned that haze into a mist and now it’s a dense fog. None of us know what we’re doing and are wandering aimlessly physically and mentally.

I hit mental walls regularly, every two weeks or so, and I’m lucky because I can talk to my GP without an appointment. I say lucky but I have fragile mental health because my brand of Bipolar Disorder is a bit of a bastard and likes to drive me to feeling suicidal when it’s a bit bored.

My “life” feels as though it’s succumbing slowly to a kind of death. My social life, which centred around trips to London and other places accompanied by a camera, has stopped. I’ve been out once with a friend since March.

My chaotic eating has descended into the bowels of hell and I’ve started buying takeaways despising myself for doing so.

Unlike death in its finality this death is enduring and there is no conclusion. I fumble around like children playing Blind Mans Bluff and there is no sign of the ending. I am tiring of social media and trying to find some positivity in it but it’s as overwhelmingly negative as the feelings I have about the current state of my life.

I’m a natural optimist. My relentless cheerfulness pisses me off at times let alone anyone else but it’s disappearing. The atmosphere brought about by the virus is nibbling away as a rat does to anything comfy it can find to make a bed. I am ending up a soggy mess in the corner of a cage just like a rats bed.

I am not dead and I have no closure.