So the great Covid19 pandemic of 2020 hit in the March, in the UK.
I acted preemptively and locked down on March 15th compared to the rest of the uk who were put into a lockdown on March 23rd, just over a week later. We stocked up on dried foods, tinned goods, hand gel and n95 masks. Also in short supply were toilet rolls which we luckily had been buying in bulk for some months, in an attempt at being environmentally friendly. We watched on tv in the week of the 15th as people queued for hours to buy the things we already had aplenty.
As the news became steadily more apocalyptic we bunkered down in our house and as we did, i lost my thin grip on reality.
Reams of news stories and scientific studies poured from the internet, discussing the cause and potential cures for covid19. Early on the British Government informed us the main way Covid19 spread was through fomite transmission. It meant washing your hands to tune of ‘happy birthday’ and scrubbing anything from outside your house. All shopping delivered would be dutifully scrubbed before being put away. We were informed by our government and scientific advisers that we, the British public, could not be trusted to use masks and that because of this we were not supposed to use masks. This politically driven exceptionalism around masks exists nearly 2 years into the pandemic. Now in early 2022, hardly anyone in the uk wears a mask and those who do are given strange looks of unsolicited advice on how ‘you don’t have to wear a mask, ya know’.
As my sanity plummeted the death and infection rate soared. Daily briefings were a mix of apocalyptic and upbeat. A long line of government MP’s were wheeled out to reel off why we should not panic, all whilst showing panic inducing slides of higher and higher death and infection rates. The cognitive dissonance in the right wing media was nauseating and insanity inducing. Chipper morning television personalities would sugarcoat the hell we were living through whilst bemoaning all measures as an irritation. Every one I witnessed eroded my sanity and feeling of safety further. My anger grew exponentially at how the conveyor belt of tv and internet celebrities seemed to all have an opinion on covid, their opinion was covid is not a threat and that the meagre government measures were fascist.
It was late on night early in the official lockdown that I noticed the moon was gone. It was a crisp and clear night with no cloud cover. I was smoking out the back and just couldn’t see the moon. In my manic state, I started to panic and become strangely excited at the thought someone had stolen or driven the moon away. I ran in the house loudly exclaiming ‘now they have taken the fucking moon!’ I was so sure, i pulled Gemma into the garden to show her that the moon had gone. I ran upstairs and grabbed my 12 year old son and said ‘the moon has been taken now!’ Meaning, that on top of the global pandemic we now had no celestial satellite and a empty space was where the moon once was. Inside my mind crumbled and collapsed. If ‘they’ could take the moon? What would be next?
What was next was that i was going to completely descend into a psychotic episode that would last for months and far into 2021. An exhilarating and exhausting and illuminating and disabling psychotic episode that i would never forget. What i would forget was how this was so real to me. That is the beguiling thing with being psychotic. Once out of the psychosis, you cannot piece together the thoughts that led you down the spiral of insanity.
The next day I googled moon phases and realised it was at the furthest end of waning phase and as such was not visible in the sky. Embarrassing? You bet it is. This is bipolar and the accompanying mania that can take a hold of your psyche.