If It's Two Minute Noodles You're Doing OK

When I look around, all I see right now is sadness. Even as I write this, I am struggling to find that uplifting narrative thread, that salve for the hurt, the tonic for the negative, themes I usually feel compelled to have running through the story. After all, there's enough doom and gloom, right?

But what if there is only doom and gloom? I live in Australia, just outside Greater Sydney, which is likely to be in lockdown until the end of the year. There is a despair being felt here that even the Olympics can't lift. The Games have been a welcome distraction but in some regards watching those shiny people living their best lives only serves to underline how most of us are barely living our lives at all. Some of us have lost our lives.

Every friend I have is right now feeling utterly miserable and defeated. My family members, my sons, my daughter, my grandchildren, my sister and brother-in-law, every one of them is being battered by this pandemic in unexpected, lousy ways.

Every man in my family is out of work today. Monday morning and not one of them has a job left to go to. Two of them work in construction, which has shut down in their local government area. One of my sons works in tourism and hospitality and no-one can travel, so there is no hospitality and there is no tourism.

My youngest son is a father and can't work. His disaster payments are less than his weekly rent. His partner is struggling to maintain the home-schooling, which has been sporadic, disorganised and difficult.

Every woman in my family is either out of work or housebound with children who are unable to attend school. They have had to cancel study courses - even if they were able to do them online, it's impossible because they are also home-schooling their kids.

My sister lost her income and is subsisting on the occasional cleaning job. Her husband was in construction and his site was closed down. He is no longer required to return to that job, even when it re-starts. Things change.

One of my friends recently moved to a small town, shortly before the lockdown. She is isolated there with two teenagers, without friends, family or any social network.

I have friends whose marriages are falling apart under the stress, financial, emotional and physical. In the house, day after day, with no income and young children demanding attention and education is enough to widen the cracks in any relationship.

We endured the 2020 Year of Covid with much less trauma it seems, because, as our government kept telling us, 'We are all in this together'.

But in Australia, it feels like it's every state and city for itself. Premiers have been able to make their own decisions about protocols for dealing with Covid outbreaks. Some states call snap lockdowns for three or four days, some states shut their borders. Our Premier chose to isolate regions where Covid was present but not lock down the whole place. Her strategy failed, the cases ramped up and by the time the lockdown was initiated, it was too late. We now have the army helping police enforce the restrictions, we have protests with thousands of people marching for their so-called 'freedom'. We also have people gathering in parks to exercise or go running, blithely forgoing wearing a mask because the government hasn't mandated they should.

We have people quietly disintegrating behind their closed and locked doors. What's making it worse is that our state has been isolated, politically and physically from the rest of the country. We are being collectively blamed and bullied and the old Australian creed of 'mateship' in times of need seems not to apply in the brave new world in 2021.

The sadness around me is palpable. Of course there is no possibility of physical, social contact so we are maintaining our relationships on the phone, or Facebook. We have nothing to talk about other than Covid and our collective misery. We're not doing anything, so we have no news. We are glued to broadcasts tallying up the numbers, waiting for the Premier to declare another area a 'hotspot', locking us down – for our own good, I get that – for another month.

When we do talk, every conversation has the same sense of sadness and despair as we wearily count down the days until the next announcement - where the virus has landed, how many have gone down, how we'll have to hang in there for another month, two months, three months.

We do not have hundreds of people dying from the virus, and for countries where that is the reality, I can't imagine the individual and shared horror of getting through that. In Sydney, the feeling is more a slow, creeping depression as we slide into poverty, joblessness, potential homelessness and social division.

Inexplicably, the worse the pandemic situation, the higher the house prices and there are many who are experiencing unexpected wealth, simply because their little pile of bricks and mortar is suddenly worth double what it was pre-pandemic. There are people who are profiting – and profiteering – from this, but I don't know them and they are certainly not among my social circle. There is a definite sense of the haves and the have-nots and that is fuelling some of the anger and much of the despair.

When Covid first landed, I think many of us were almost grateful that we had an enforced break from our over-stimulated lives. We learnt to knit or paint by numbers, we cooked, we did jigsaw puzzles. The 'new normal' was one of those too-cute phrases politicians use to prepare us for the unpalatable things to come.

There is a new normal and it's awful. The new normal is to be isolated and lonely. The new normal is to be suspicious of strangers in the neighbourhood, people escaping lockdown who may be Covid positive. The new normal is to accept joblessness smack bang in the middle of your career or derailing the years spent building a business. The new normal is for your children to un-learn all the activities and skills which helped them thrive – their sports, their music lessons, their schooling and their friendships. The new normal is accepting social distancing, by necessity, but forgetting that we once hugged and shook hands and kissed each other's cheeks. The new normal is to cancel any plans to share – to share the joy of a concert, a picnic, a birthday gathering, lunch with friends, a visit from Grandma. If I start listing what this new normal is, I'll cry.

This cannot be normal. It might be new but we should never accept it as permanent. We should never allow what we have to do to be safe here and right now, to devalue what we need as human beings. We need to touch, to gather, to share. We need spontaneity, laughter, fun, dancing, singing. We need to hold our ceremonies, to farewell our loved ones, to celebrate our milestones.

Of course we must absolutely do what is asked of us to save ourselves from this virus. We have the tools to do that and we should support the experts who know how we can get out of this. But we must always remember what we gave up. Governments love control - and I am not for one second a conspiracist or an anti-vaxxer - but once there is no pressing need for any of this, once we are vaccinated, once we have good science, good pandemic controls, once we get the winning hand, let's forget this 'new normal'.

We need a new phrase – and I have found my positive narrative thread. We need to know there is hope for a return to 'non-isolation', to social intimacy, to human touch. We want governments to focus not on politics but on rebuilding our broken economies, our broken society, with eyes wide open. There is no point giving us a balm to ease our collective despair. Give us certainty that you've got this.

We'll get the human part right, just as we did in the times of 'old normal'. My rallying cry to my friends and family, to anyone struggling through a lockdown, is that yes, it's a bitch. There's no-one doing any better than you, you are not failing because you are climbing the walls, you are not failing because you can't face another day watching Peppa Pig with the kids, you are not failing because it's two minute noodles for dinner again, you are not failing because you don't want to get out of bed today.

If you get to the end of this day, along with your partner, your kids or just your single self, you've done something. Right now, all that can be asked of you is to do it again tomorrow and for sure, for absolutely sure, one day this will end.