I’m writing this now in a time of anxiety because I’m recognising myself 8 years ago and experiencing the same dread, purposelessness and sense of loss of purpose.
Being told that it’s okay, we’ll shuttle you through and pass you anyway isn’t the same as earning a badge or a qualification. I remember back in my pre-university days when I and my fellow Venture Scouts undertook an expedition in France. It didn’t involve mountains or isolated places; its main challenges aside from carrying heavy loads through fields and up hill and down dale across rural Brittany was the heat. Real, searing heat that bested anything that was blazing on Africa at that time if contemporary newspaper weather forecasts were at all reliable. Of the 8 of us, two came down with really nasty, need to be hospitalised heat stroke and diarrhoea. I was a borderline case.
By day four, we knew we had to look after ourselves. Having passed a stressed out night in a wholly unsuitable field shared with unwelcoming cows and risen early but unrested to trudge on our last 12 miles we were soon outpaced by the rising sun which beat down unforgivingly as we stumbled along a glaring canal path and up steep roads with no walkways.
Some time after lunch we should have been strolling victorious into the scout camp where we were to be the assistant camp leaders for the duration of the next 10 days. We were pretty beat, but we got there. We arrived by car after desperately flagging down a passer-by who scooped up our things and drove us the last half mile or so. Two of our number were immediately taken to the medical tent and their soiled clothes tended to over the next few days by others less affected by the uncaring sun.
Telling the tale some months later, I recalled my shame that we took the stranger’s lift. That shame – and others – stayed with me for years and years. Only about 5 years ago someone gently broke it to me that we’d done exactly the right thing, ensuring everyone in our group’s health when it was under threat.
Today I’ve been feeling a fair amount of anxiety again. I want to support the people around me and I want to focus on the things I’m supposed to be achieving too. University lecturers are at pains to help me and my fellow students through our MA and are being incredibly supportive. Of course, I don’t want to be waved through and told yes, that’s it, you’re done when I know I haven’t. I want to be doing my best, even though some of the expectations are impractical ones- the libraries are closed, online presentations just aren’t the same and so on.
Musing on it while having some much-needed time in the garden I realised it’s similar to the dread and anxiety that went with some work changes years ago. Unexpected changes of responsibility; not being able to find news ways of working when I asked for them; no longer feeling needed; having someone turn round and say that something (not necessarily a big thing) that I’d done for years was now something they were doing and, basically, back off. It’s upsetting and undermining and not necessarily someone’s fault. But it is like a rug being pulled and it made me lose my way and made me stressed and anxious over more than a year.
With all that’s going on at the moment and the uncertainties of this whole new way of living and working it’s probably no surprise that it’s bringing up things I usually push to the back of my mind. But I’m sure I’m not the only one feeling that sense of dread, and what was it all for all those years of trying and caring just to find I’ve got all the time in the world to ponder it while the world moves on.
It’s going to take a while for the shift of gear to click in and to realise that actually the self care and the care for others or for a career can’t be at the expense of myself. But blimey it’s weird!
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