OPINION - What Shielding for a Year Taught Me
Matthew Taylor
To think we took it all for granted. To be able to stand in a supermarket queue, share a lift at a department store, run your fingers down the spines of books in a library, share a car ride with a friend.
The last year has transformed every aspect of our lives; friendships have been stretched to breaking point, our education has suffered, and all sense of intimacy and vulnerability are now associated with risk. By definition, love seems out of reach.
I’ve been shielding since the pandemic hit. I’ve seen my friends a handful of times this year and the last time I saw anyone outside my bubble was in July. Despite this, I had, and still have, the best set of friends anyone could ask for. When the first lockdown hit, as all friend groups did, we rallied around each other. We shared the traditional Zoom quizzes that soon became a hallmark of those first few months, sloppy escapades in defiance of a world that robbed us of the celebration and closure that came with leaving high school.
When restrictions started to ease, and my friends began to meet up again, the risk to my physical health barred me from the freedom they began to once again enjoy.
After a few weeks, they stopped asking if I wanted to join them because they had begun to realise it was pointless asking. There was little I or they could do to improve my situation. This had a huge impact on my mental health. Seeing my friends having fun together made me feel like I was being excluded.
When you’re isolated for that length of time, your head becomes an echo chamber and it becomes difficult to escape the thoughts in your head, even if you have the best friends in the world. Over time you begin to think your friends don’t care about you, that you’ve been forgotten about and that you’ll never be able to bounce back when circumstances finally change. Isolation breeds compliance of irrationality and will break even the strongest of wills.
Every day you go without reaching out to anyone, the harder it gets. You feel guilty for your absence, and a sense of loss at the parties you haven’t been to, the inside jokes you now feel completely alien to. You forget what spending time with your friends is meant to feel like.
Descriptions of my time in lockdown may come across as beggarly, but this is not my intention, nor the case in practice. As those close to me will know, there’s nothing I detest more than pity. My goal, by sharing my experience, is to show that there is always hope, even in the darkest moments. Lockdown, whilst at times a curse provided me with a capacity for previously unfeasible personal growth.
Before the pandemic, I thought I was a strong person, who had just managed to recover from the emotional abuse of an on-and-off toxic relationship that had lasted almost the entirety of my teenage years. Lockdown allowed me to not only explore the repressed feelings of those events, but to break a numbness that appeared insurmountable and learn how to trust and rebuild. I taught myself to allow those feelings to be expressed, and work through what had happened. I began to compensate for the lack of external value in my life by diving head-first into my university course and a passionate, shared vision for mental health education in schools, by launching Pure Mental NI.
In recent weeks, I’ve been reunited with my friends, meeting them once a week for a walk around my neighbourhood, slowly reintegrating myself with their company. A year of social isolation has left me the most content, confident and independent version of myself I’ve ever been, and has transformed me from a door-matted student, to one with developing strength of character and capacity for mental fortitude.
To those of you who have friends or family in a similar position to my own, I’d strongly encourage you to reach out. Ask, as my friends did, to meet up for a walk, one on one, with no expectations. You don’t have to talk the whole time or even say anything. Just being present in the moment with them may be unimaginably beneficial to them. Be with them. They’ve missed that.
For those of you in my position, if I can do it, you can too. Don’t pressure yourself to stay in touch with everyone at once but try to reach out to one person every day, for five minutes. Start small, and gradually, over weeks, not days, build yourself back up. Your friends care about you and when the pandemic draws to a close, we’ll never take that for granted again.
Matthew Taylor is an Anthropology and Philosophy student at Queen’s University Belfast. and the Co-Founder of Pure Mental NI.