Understanding Change: Lockdown One in the UK And my experience

Like other moments in history, people will be asking me where I was and what I was doing when Lockdown 1 was announced. How I coped with the world spinning at a thousand miles an hour, just like I'd been used to for all my life, to nothing. It was like a storm came and washed away everything I held dear. The world, for the first time in my life, felt alien, just as I was getting to grips with it. The word change, for me, has been the defining word for the whole of 2020. I'm not the same person now as I was then. And I want to walk you, the reader, through the changes in my life over the first lockdown here in the UK.

The first emotion is anxiety. Lots of it. It fills my mouth, swims into my stomach, wraps around my arms and legs, binds me to the ground and lets me get up, only to pound back down to the ground again. It was anxiety about my health, my family, my teachers, and my friends in other countries. It was a lot. The weight was pressing down, causing me to sink into the raging waters, unable to get back to land. In other words, the tide was too fast to roll in and out again, so I couldn't get a grip of it. And even if I did, the sand that I did end up getting washed away in my hands when the waves next came. Or it slipped through.

The TV suddenly started to report the numbers of cases, deaths, and what this meant. How the new restrictions impacted us, with one message: stay at home and protect the health service. There was an Ad that aired towards the start of lockdown, promising how this time will pass, how the nightingale hospitals will close their doors, and how one day, we will be able to get back. And how the BBC will report every step of the way.

Like many people, my main want was to get back to normal, wishing this was a dream- wishing that one day it would be over. Those months of 2020 were so rough, not only on the world; but me personally.

In a blink of an eye, mom was recovering from cancer treatment whilst this virus ripped through the world, and change was overwhelming. The number of times I managed to break down because of the stress, the constant adaptation to online learning, the changes in the college system, not knowing how long this will go on. Not knowing when this hell will end, when the red light on the TV will turn to green and we all go. It felt like we were on house arrest like we all - collectively- did something wrong. Of course, we didn’t, and I knew that. I knew that the world was being ravaged by a virus = and the solution was to shut it down and limit the spread.

Still, it felt like we were locked up, chained to the walls of our homes. All whilst the word of the day: cases and deaths kept on coming.

I needed somewhere, so like a person, I turned to the news, looking for something hopeful. I tried to distract myself with studies and books, but it didn't help too much. There was still this overwhelming anxiety. Even more, was the pressure of A-levels (exams taken in the UK after 16) at the time. Although throughout the pandemic, the pressure of uncertainty of what I had actually signed up for was raging’ specifically what the final assessments would look like, what we would actually do. The best practice was to look over everything, but the motivation was low, considering the constant entrapment in the house and the uncertainty over what exams would look like.

As the experts were learning to deal with the virus and understand how it worked, I was trying to understand my anxiety and how to stop - or reduce - it. But the studies and the pressure got to me even more. The anxiety over the world was a lot, then I searched for glimmers of hope during the dark anxious storms. I found a few nuggets of joy, there weren't many. There were that many to keep me going, so I spiralled into a depression. The anxiety spiking, depression spiking, I then started to become uncomfortable with my body, with everything that made me up. I was given time to reflect but the anxiety and other thoughts made it too hard to do so. I was drowning in the high waves that crashed over me. They kept on crashing, filling up my lungs, and I felt like I was drowning. Like at any moment I would sink and get taken under and die.

After the great shutdown, otherwise known as the lockdown One, the world was a different place. I was a different person. Having just gone through the first year of sixth form. I was stressed, depressed, sad, and anxious. Anxious for whatever the next few months would hold, considering the roller coaster ride the first six or seven months were.

I didn't have any reason to be, but I was. I was scared that in a snap of a finger, with the moon running away, with the change of tides, that the world would fill with water again, and I would be drowning again. And I think that most people felt the same way as I did. Although I kept my emotions to myself, I kept them hidden, but emotional regulation is something I’ve always struggled with.

The spring bled into the summer when the world could finally take some form of a breath. The world was waking up when it was placed into a slumber. And like the world, people did too. When the man in charge announced the first reopening plan, I crossed my fingers. I crossed my fingers that lockdowns two and three weren't going to be a reality. That we were through the hard patch. Even though we didn't have any vaccines or any treatments, I somehow thought that the change we went through, the waves wouldn't come too high up on the shore, and much more overwhelm us. I was foolish.

But something more personal was happening. Throughout the first lockdown, I felt something was wrong. There was something about my identity, who I was that was off. Something that didn’t fit, like a deformed puzzle piece (as I later found out that was the fact I wasn’t cis).

My point is that change was going to happen. I'm not the same person I was. I'm not the same person I was back in the third lockdown, or the first. I don't hold the same values, don't have the same naivety, and don't hold the same destructive values. Quarantine, for me, was a world where I could reflect, through all the anxiety, through all the destruction, the protests, the social movements, the debates, the world shutting down again, opening up again, I'm not the same person.

And whilst the world will carry on spinning, and whatever happens next is a mystery, I know now that change isn't something I need to fear, but something I need to embrace. And I think that going with the flow and living every day to the fullest, where I'm comfortable, and embracing the changes that come my way is the best thing out of a bad situation.