Lockdown Day 108

What’s the biggest irresistible urge you’ve ever had?

For me, it was the urge to push, during childbirth. Despite all the reading I’d done, I was shocked at the intensity of the sensation. It’s like you’re not in control of your body - like something else is making decisions for you and you have no choice but to follow. To a far lesser degree, I feel that way about writing: if I feel the urge to write, I need to write.

When my children were younger, writing was generally something I’d do late at night, after all my duties were done. I’d also write whenever they were doing Saturday activities and I needed to wait for them.  I remember creating time to write by taking them down to a restaurant that had a kids’ play area; I’d sit in the parents’ area with my journal, keeping an eye on them and writing at the same time. In the many years that my children lived with each parent every alternate week, my routines were based on one week of being a single mother, and one of being a single woman, living alone.  Absolutely free to do my own thing when alone, I’d journal a lot more then.

Come to think of it, even now my writing happens either late at night, or on weekends during the day. But the urge hits me throughout the day. It’s just that my duties pull me in another direction. This is a constant source of frustration, to me.

I started blogging in mid-2009, after being strongly encouraged to do so by two people, 8 years apart  – a dear friend, as far back as 1998, and a life coach, in about 2006. I’ll always be grateful to them for getting me to start this journey. 11 years later, technology has changed so much but I seem to be stuck in my original style of blogging: lots of paragraphs of writing off the cuff and from the heart, with a photo or two, taken by me, related to either the content or my mood while writing.

I don’t always read my friends’ blog posts when they share them on Fb, but when I do, I find myself reading a few of their posts in one sitting.   I don’t know how important the number of views is to them, but to me, I’d continue writing even if no-one read my blog. Having said as much, I do check my stats occasionally.

This was a significant fortnight, for me. On 1 July, I went to my doctor, with flu symptoms. I was examined in the Isolation Ward and sent for a COVID-19 test. TEN days later, I received the official result: Negative. Only when I saw that word in the SMS did I realise how tense I’d been about the outcome. I hadn’t felt anything more than my usual winter symptoms, but because there are so many variations of how COVID-19 presents, I wasn’t entirely sure whether I’d contracted it or not. I was VERY happy to have tested negative, for many reasons.  

                                           The drive-through testing place I went to.

I’m sitting with my usual love-hate relationship with Facebook. I love keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances, near and far, and I particularly love seeing what creative people are doing. During lockdown, I’ve been buoyed by how others have coped, and been inspired to start little creative projects to reduce my anxiety and to just get through this unbelievable period of lockdown aimed at reducing the spread of a virus of global pandemic proportions. (I had to write that out in full, because there’s still something unbelievable about it all!) I love reading about interesting things around the world, often flagged in the form of links posted on Fb.  What distresses me are the awful comments people make, spewing hatred and showing the ugly underbelly of social media. For example, someone shared a post by a woman who’d been in an abusive relationship. She’d chosen to write very openly about the violence and to include graphic, bloody photos of herself after being beaten. To my horror, there were quite a number of misogynistic comments - people openly saying that she shouldn’t have back-chatted her husband, that men don’t like it when women talk back….. ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS?!!!

That kind of thing affects me SO deeply, that I want to disconnect from all social media platforms and crawl into a safe space, away from the ugliness and violence, the cruelty, the misogyny – that persistent entitlement that men feel, despite everything that’s out there in the public domain. It breaks my heart that the patriarchal system we live in gives men permission to boldly write that kind of thing on social media without fear of censure or reprisal. It hurts me that practically every social network (not an internet reference) we form part of maintains the status quo of the patriarchy, and that women are still regarded as a minority, and othered – our voices indulgently listened to in board meetings, while the real decisions are made by men, some of whose only power lies in their being male. How’s that for privilege?

I’ve become sad again.  Don’t even get me started on how women support the patriarchy and oppress other women. Facebook is full of it.

And so I continue to go through life, controlling what I can, creating things that have meaning to me, speaking out wherever I can, knowing all the time that society has many other seemingly benign institutions that effectively keep women in check. Knowing that even in some of my circles of friends, there are certain topics I could never raise. 

                                    Been knitting beanies, recently, to pass the time creatively. 

My daughter asked me what I missed most, during lockdown. Besides my family, I couldn’t think of anything other than the freedom to go where I wanted to, when I wanted to.

Other than that, lockdown suits me to a T.

                          Yet another sunset I've been lucky to observe - Sat 11 July 2020