How is your mental health?

Early on in lockdown I found myself experiencing some days as harder than others.  There were days where I might just cry all day, hardly having the energy just to go out for a walk, but there were other days I would feel a true sense of relief that the normal pressures of everyday life had been temporarily suspended.  Gratitude for my health, security and time with my partner would rush in and I felt I could see a way beyond the present crisis to a better time.  The term ‘Coronacoaster’ fitted the bill: quick ups, quick downs, but all within a relatively safe theme park where, probably, I knew the basic rules of science and gravity would apply and things would right themselves in the end.  For various reasons, I’d spent a lot of time in counselling, developing a yoga practice and generally equipping myself with a pretty decent tool kit to look after my mental health up to the start of this year. I was convinced that in those early weeks and months of lockdown that was why, in general, I felt I was doing pretty well, and from what I could tell coping better than many other people insofar as my outlook was pretty positive and optimistic. I could ride out the waves and survive the storm.

As the months draw on, however, the ups and downs start to seem more tidal than just waves rising or crashing on a day by day basis, and struggling against that tidal pull to avoid drowning altogether seems to be taking almost all the strength and tools I have. Exercise, meditation, lighting candles, making tea, taking baths and the odd gin & tonic isn’t so much a question of comforting, soothing or enhancing how I am experiencing my life as one of strenuous effort just to keep on a vaguely even keel.

Having been in a particularly tough slump over the last week or so, I decided yesterday to go and visit some friends in South London where I used to live for over 13 years, until I moved away in March.  I wanted to be in a place where I could feel roots that pre-dated Corona times, and to connect to some of the people I’ve known longest in my life.  (I also swam in the lido, and it was glorious). There were some bits of news, people moving from a small one-bed flat in Herne Hill to a house in Brighton, funded PHD places awarded, a head of department completely re-writing the curriculum for her school’s Classics course to make it more diverse and relevant to the world we now live in. Thinking about that again now, I’m even more amazed and impressed with her fortitude to tackle something like that in her summer holidays. Seriously, hats off. But from all of these people who I’ve known for so long as lively, energetic, positive and basically happy people, there was also a sense of really struggling to keep heads above water, and also struggling to find meaning and hold onto things they had previously held dear. Whereas early on in lockdown we might all have looked at the things that remained when everything else was stripped back and realised how important they are to us, now instead, we see the lack of everything else focussed onto those very same things and they bear the brunt of our resentment, sadness and struggle.  Be that partners, family, homes or jobs, the expectation that these things which remain can fulfil us in the same way that our full lives did before is both unrealistic and unfair.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is something I’ve come across before, but it cropped up on my social media timeline again the other day, and was a really timely reminder about what we’re going through now, and why that sense of emotional and mental well-being is so elusive at the moment.  Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is presented as a pyramid of human needs, and the idea is that once the lower level(s) are established we can move on to the higher ones.  At the bottom level are Physiological needs – air, water, shelter, sleep. On top of that are Safety needs – personal security, employment, resources, health, property.  Only once those two levels are met can we begin to make space for the third level – Love and Belonging: friendship, intimacy, family, sense of connection. Next up is Esteem: respect, self-esteem, status, recognition, strength, freedom.  And finally, on the very top, Self-actualization: desire to become the most that one can be, which encompasses things like creativity, morality, spontaneity, lack of prejudice and acceptance of facts.

Bear in mind that you can’t progress up the pyramid without the building blocks underneath you, and you can start to understand how life right now feels so devoid of fulfilment, pleasure and meaning for so many.  Looking at my own life pre-covid, I realise that I was in the incredibly privileged position of playing around right at the top of that pyramid.  Not only were my basic physiological and safety needs met, I had a full and busy personal and professional life with close and meaningful relationships with family and friends, a job I loved and which gave me a real sense of purpose, and with all of that in place the space in my brain to be playing around with ideas of how I could live my best life.  And now? I come a cropper right there on the second rung up. My work as a singer has all but ground to a complete halt, currently with little prospect of this returning.  Look one rung up, and no small surprise that after months of enforced separation from friends and family that sense of security, closeness and being surrounded by intimacy and connection has taken a serious beating.  Look even further up – status, recognition, strength, freedom? The feeling of powerlessness against so many forces with new rules we don’t even know what they are yet, let alone how to operate within them can be overwhelming. 

And then we look at the top rung – creativity, morality, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts – is it any wonder that there is so much antagonism within society, or people refusing to believe they need to comply with social distancing or face mask rules when so much basic human need is not being met at the moment?  I don’t say that as an excuse for people behaving selfishly or breaking the rules, but I say it both as a way to forgive ourselves for our own struggles to be the people we were before, and the people we want to be right now, and hopefully also to extend that same compassion to friends and strangers around us.  

So what do we do from here? My own solutions for now are to cut myself as much slack as I possibly can in terms of how I judge myself and my life, to try and booby-trap it with as many positive and meaningful connections to others as I safely can, and to try and support friends and family in doing the same.  I’ll also keep on walking, doing yoga, running baths, meditating and throwing myself into cold bodies of water, however much effort it seems to take for less than overwhelming results right now. As for the employment gap on my second rung, I’ve decided to turn this one on its head and sign up for a part-time creative writing course with the Open University from October.  Being a student again can be a kind of employment, and I’m hoping it will be an area where I can experience freedom in my writing, formal recognition from having completed a structured course, and self-esteem and respect for changing what I can of the situation in which I find myself, whilst trying simultaneously to let go of a desire to control those other circumstances surrounding my singing work which I simply cannot. You never know, it might just work.

There will be different solutions for all of us to get through this time, but I sincerely wish everyone as much love, support and compassion as we can each find for ourselves and others as we keep navigating our way through this new world.