ALONE

Well this last week has been a bit of a struggle.

I developed symptoms consistent with Covid-19 so was forced to work from home, to stay away from everyone I live with and quite tightly curtail the day to day life I led as I entered isolation.

Now the overall picture of my time locked away is really nothing more than I was spending time in the office at home rather than going to work and then I was pretty much living the spare bedroom so as not to potentially infect everyone else.

Now I’m feeling much better now so everyone can relax but I couldn’t help but consider the topic of isolation and how it can be a point of exploration for characters in more ways than first thought.

Now I was confined to basically three rooms for a week so in the grand scheme of things, not much of a hardship but suddenly being chained to rigid rules of movement and contact with other humans, thereby stopping me doing so much that I just took for granted on any day, suddenly gave me the irrational desire to go and do all those things which burned like a fire.

I couldn’t watch TV with my wife and mother in law. I couldn’t go downstairs. I couldn’t go and see my mum. I couldn’t go to work. I couldn’t sleep in the same bed as my wife. I couldn’t hug my wife.

I wasn’t locked in a cell without anything to see or do. I had my tablet so could look at all kinds of things on the interweb and I had a book to keep me company so it wasn’t like I was buried alive, but in my mind, the sudden loss of contact with the world that I was familiar with was hugely magnified and I was acutely aware very quickly of what I couldn’t do. The suffering was born from knowing what I’d lost and that there was nothing I could do about it.

No doubt we’ve all read stories or seen films or TV shows where the protagonist is imprisoned. There are examples of both lawful and wrongful incarceration and then how characters are able to confront their sudden loss of liberty. How do they come to terms with their lot? What do they have to overcome in the new life they have?

But isolation isn’t solely incarceration.

We can feel isolated despite being surrounded by hundreds of people. We could feel utterly alone despite speaking with hundreds of people. We can be isolated by actions of people around us or we could feel isolated because we feel that no one understands who we are and what we could be going through. We are more than capable of building  prisons for our minds so putting a character in a cell isn’t the only way that they can be separated from the crowd.

The world over today, the reality of isolation is something that we all have to deal with in some shape or form so I think that we all have a much deeper understanding of the realities of what we all do but more importantly, we can see just how a small change can really shatter the calm normality we all know and love.

Maybe that could start to give some kind of explanation why there are so many people apparently happy to ignore the advice of the experts and not stay home during the current pandemic?

Nobody wants to be isolated.

No-one wants to be alone.