Re-entry

15 Mar Re-entry

Almost a year since the first lockdown began. A couple of weeks till the third one starts to ease. Maybe. Not sure I trust all the dates, the almost-promises that summon hope could turn out to be false ones. The doubt is wearying and I reckon it’s safer and kinder to the self to assume things will not change when they say they will. At least then there’s the tiniest chance of a pleasant surprise. 

On the radio the other morning Felicity Aston spoke to Martha Cairney about re-entry anxiety. I’d never heard of it and wondered if it was something newly made up, a diagnostic spin-off from the pandemic. It is ‘a thing’ apparently and not new, only newly in the spotlight because of COVID. I’d never heard of Felicity either though something sticks in my mind about her claim to fame. She was the first, possibly the only woman to ski solo across the Antarctic. Two months of solitude on the frozen whiteness at the bottom of the earth. Why would you do that, I found the voice in my head muttering, barely able to comprehend dealing with the cold let alone the effort, the solitude and the lack of colour? Of course, she must be the only one. Why would you ever want to be the second woman to do it? 

She spoke about what it was like to re-emerge into society after her journey was over, how the social etiquettes slipped back into place effortlessly like a muscle memory but how she also experienced an ‘unseen hangover’ from the strange state of being she’d occupied for those two months. Returning she felt split in two: half of her going perfectly happily through the motions of social intercourse, the other half detached, hidden away somewhere deep inside her mind processing what she’d been through.

I wished that she’d had longer to expand on the ‘processing’. It was too close to 9 o’clock and nothing gets in the way of the pips! I’d have liked to hear her talk about that state of being, the inner resources she’d discovered to cope with the remote aloneness, whether there were things she liked about it, learned from it, grieved for after her journey ended. I’m not suggesting that lockdown has been anything like her story. Even if we’ve had to self-isolate we could still peer out the window, see and hear other people, pick up the phone, have a zoom. But there are similarities – absenting ourselves from our customary social fabric, having to find ways to adapt when the world turned inhospitable and unfamiliar. 

Made me think. Though I wouldn’t say the last year has been characterised by solitude, I realise my social contacts have definitely been pared back. This wasn’t conscious. It just happened that I wasn’t attentive to my wider social network, the more infrequent, episodic friendships were not so well nourished and the ties may have loosened a bit. On the other hand, some friendships have deepened and I’ve reconnected with one or two people whom I’d mislaid, old friends I’d lost in the long grass by the side of life’s trail. Something about this past year, finding time available in different pockets from usual and my head in a different space has had me reaching out to bridge the absent years. This is the kind of processing I’d like to understand. How the way we’ve had to live during the pandemic, the withdrawing we’ve had to do, has made many of us re-evaluate and reorder things, letting some go. But, at the same time, rescuing and restoring others. 

Made me think, too, about what I will ease back into life when the easing starts. Will I have re-entry anxiety? I’m out of practice with groups of more than six, public places, transport, shops. To be honest, I’ve not missed those things that much. Lots of people have said the same.  They long to be able to meet and embrace family, to sit in a friend’s kitchen over a lazy lunch or a quiet dinner but they don’t particularly want to go back to how things were. I wonder sometimes if the pandemic has shown us more of who we are and I’m discovering a streak of anti-sociability in me, a reclusive quality I didn’t know was there!

We humans seem to be reasonably good at adapting so I’m guessing I’ll adjust by and by to being in society again. But maybe on new terms because I’ll remember that there have been gains, mostly of time and an understanding of the value of space and quietness, even though for some that very space and quietness may have been torture. I have no idea how it will be when the easing comes, how hesitant I’ll be, how unsettling I might find it. But the prospect of being together with a few friends, greeting them with a hug before sitting around a table sharing food is completely joyful. I’m trying not to get too excited about it, bearing in mind those false promises. But when it happens I’ll understand better than I used to how precious it is.