In-voluntary imprisonment.

It’s a year today. A year since the midnight curfew after which our whole country went into total lockdown. A year since hurriedly moving into the house I’d bought, weeks before the carefully planned deadline and renovations that were supposed to happen and then didn’t. 

Things I’ve learned – or got better at – over this past year, alone in this new house-now-home: How to freak completely the fuck out. How not to freak completely the fuck out. How to assemble furniture. How to assemble furniture with one hand while the other hand holds the phone on video call with your dad. How to operate a lawnmower to achieve the dual goal of mowed lawn and avoiding electrocution. How to manage a pool so as to keep the water blue. How to keep a garden alive. How to prevent a garden from eating you alive. How many Figure 8s I must run around my garden to complete my daily 5km. How to change door handles, unblock drains, paint well-water-stained walls, fail at hanging pictures, find a handyman who would end up on my speed dial list. How to negotiate services to help me secure my home, install a door for my home therapy practice, and build a catio to keep my beloved cats safe. How to sanitise surfaces I didn’t know could be sanitised (aka, the great grocery cleanse of 2020). How to move my therapy work online. How to move everything online. How to safely receive online deliveries. How, for that matter, to conduct an entirely virtual romance, with Takealot. How to contract meningitis while in total isolation. How to endure the trauma of two weeks in hospital, Outside and Away from my home and my beloved cats. How kind and generous old friends, family, and new neighbours could be to a very sick single person and her two cats.

Things I’ve unlearned: How to dress myself in anything other than my suitable-for-home-use-only lockdown uniform, running clothes, and pyjamas. How to sit at a desk. How long tops must be to be Zoom-appropriate while avoiding having to wear pants. How to conduct risk assessments during rare 10-minute grocery shops based on physical distance and whether a mask is covering the mouth and nose of a fellow shopper. How to drive on highways. How to talk – like, out loud – for longer than the few minutes it takes to engage in conversations with my cats. How to go Outside. How to interact with real people. How to feel safe anywhere other than inside my house, alone, on the couch with a laptop and two cats on my lap. How, in other words, to be Human. 

Holding my breath. Poised for attack. That’s how, generally speaking, I spent my life pre-COVID. Waiting, hoping, trying, endlessly and futilely, to feel safe. Physically safe, yes. But, more accurately, psychologically safe. Depression is a particular kind of monstrous creature; anxiety is a whole other kind of beast. Anxiety doesn’t care if you have everything you need to live a fulfilled life. Anxiety doesn’t care at all, in fact, about the present. My anxiety only cares about the future. And every plausible and implausible way in which things are about to go terribly wrong, fall spectacularly apart, be devastatingly lost. Threats known and unknown, seen and unseen, likely and unlikely. 

Enter COVID-19. On a global and physical scale, the pandemic obliterated any real safety-from-risk. But, on a personal level, because I had the privilege of having my own home in which I could self isolate and work from, I could largely manage those risks and, to a certain extent, the anxiety attached to them. And so, for the first time in a long, long time, my daily world suddenly became about as safe as I had spent years longing for it to be: no getting up and putting on my adult armour and stepping out into the world, poised for the relentless sense of pending internal and external annihilation that being me in the world involved, every single day. No longer having to Go Out. No longer having to feel as though every bit of my energy had to be channelled towards surviving, enduring being me-in-the-world, the constant fight or flight that comes with being outside my house. No more daily commute, which means no more twice-or-more daily anticipation of death. No more putting on the figurative mask (oh the irony), the false self, pretending to be Okay. Hiding all the Not Okay.

Enter my ideal safe daily life: never having to leave the house. Even better: not being allowed to leave the house, so not adding to my anxiety the dread-full sense that I am letting people down, or that I am defective because I am not going out and seeing people I love. Even better still: no one else being able to do this either, for a while anyway. Everyone’s life suddenly taking on a reclusiveness that looked decidedly like my regular life, thereby significantly taking the edge off my excruciating sense of being Other, of standing outside of human existence watching everyone doing ordinary life in ways that felt extraordinary and elusive to me. Every day I got to just be at home, sit with my laptop and my two cats on my couch, not have to go Outside. Safety utopia.  

So imagine my dismay at waking up and realising that I still felt utterly unsafe. At risk. Under threat even in the so-called absence of tangible threats, in these carefully controlled conditions.

Here’s the thing. Anxiety doesn’t care about the circumstances of your life. It pays no attention to the fact that you have a safe and lovely home. Food. Warmth. A secure job. Technology and uncapped Wifi to keep you connected with everyone who cares about you. Water. Health. Lungs that can breathe in precious oxygen. Never having to actually go Outside and face what feels like inevitable psychic death. All those things that you do, every day, feel profoundly grateful for. No, anxiety is too busy looking for the bear that must be behind that tree (or maybe that couch) that is obviously about to obliterate all of the above and more. So you try to get further away from the bear, put more things between you and it, not realising that the more literal and figurative walls you put up, locks you install, bars you erect, the more things there are to be at-risk of being removed, taken down, breached – the more things there are to attach fear to, and, very paradoxically, the less safe everything feels. 

I have lived for a year in this sort-of-utopic safety. And it has, truly, felt more safe in more ways than life-before-in-the-world ever felt. But life is increasingly happening out there, beyond these walls. The apocalypse has happened, the bombs have gone off, the virus has exploded, and everyone is having to find ways to continue to live in this new, toxic post-apocalyptic world. It will eventually no longer be possible to stay down here in this underground basement with the trapdoor sealed shut. But, a year on, the Outside World has come to represent everything that is un-survivable, un-basement unsafe. There is air that must be breathed. People to be interacted with. Unknowable and unseen life events that must unfold. If you’ve lived safely in a basement for a year and someone handed you a hazmat suit and told you to open the basement trapdoor and go outside into the post-apocalyptic world, why on toxic earth would you want to? Your anxiety tells you that even if you survive out there for an hour or a day or a week, when you make it home to tell the feline tails of what happened, you will return to find that everything you surrounded yourself with to feel safe in that basement, including and worst of all your beloved cats, has been obliterated, proving that you should never have left the basement so exposed without your presence to protect it in the first place.  

Herein lies the paradox of anxiety: the danger of trying to be inviolably safe. The safety that is simultaneously a privileged freedom and a painful, (in)voluntary imprisonment.