Officially, the pandemic/ lockdown phase ended for us a year and a half ago, but that doesn't mean that isolation hasn't lingered on for me. Prior to the mess, and mental health catastrophe, I worked from home and noticed I needed to spend a day in coworking or working from a cafe to break the isolation - this is what the pandemic took away from me. And it was physically painful. I have discussed all of the psysiological impacts with my therapist of isolation, the physical damage it does to your body. It was physically painful for me to be isolated for eight months of lockdown. Worse was the rollercoaster every time it ended only to interrupt my recovery by starting again.
I developed new habits, many unhealthy, because I felt so unhealthy. I observed many times during the past three years how online myself I felt. I hit a low about two years ago when I couldn't see a reason for life to continue, and I adapted by getting into the gym to clear my head. I observed my burnout and need for structure, so I made plans, that life kept yanking away from me. For the past year, there is a weekly writing group, which has been at minimum my weekly social interactions, but I have noticed if something else interferes like an online meeting or call, I may go over a week without seeing a person, and start to feel the same pain of isolation. It has real impact on my perception and resilience.
Last month I started to think about it as "Isoltion sickness." I noticed that because I still did not have ENOUGH interaction, when I saw someone, it led to just info dumping oversharing on my part. I still crave the habits that became familiar to me, watching too many shows, eating too much food, staying at home because inertia feels too much to overcome to start creating more/ different habits. Things that exhaust my energy or interrupt my sleep to prevent becoming more active, as well as the lack of structure.
For those reasons, when I enrolled in a course this summer, I started to look forward at this huge adjustment to a completely different lifestyle. Indeed, now three weeks into being around people every day, structure requiring me to wake up and have a morning routine to get to class, I no longer feel that PAIN. In addition, the mental stimulation and challenge makes me feel like myself for the first time in a long time.
Some memes have helped me with how all of this made me feel about myself. One that I wasn't lazy, that I was just exhausted, summarised the exhaustion of survival. Some of the habits I clung to out of familiarity are becoming things I no longer need for coping mechanisms. This weekend I saw a friend and was discussing this with her. She said if I was starting to feel the transformation from the inside, the other parts would come and start to move in the right direction. The extreme weight situation is a serious health concern for me, but imposing rigid patterns have felt impossible and painful for me, only serving to make me feel worse about my inability to follow them.
Are any of you still lingering from the impact of prolonged isolation? What helps you start to feel or see change?
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