I can’t do it. I’ve tried. I have put my trainers on, got a podcast lined up and headed out the door for my local park. But after around five minutes of determined strides, I find myself turning back around and heading for the safety of home.
However much I try, I just can’t bring myself to do that walk. It’s too loaded. Too heavy with memories. This particular walk is just one of the seemingly tiny and insignificant reminders of the intense two-and-a-bit years when our lives turned upside down. A time that I’d rather forget, mentally out of bounds and avoided at all costs.
On 23 March 2020, Boris Johnson took to our screens and announced that we would be going into lockdown. When we realised that this issue would mark five years since that date, a collective groan echoed around the table in our meeting at Cosmopolitan HQ. The consensus was that we didn’t want to read even one more thing about that period of time, or the dreaded C-word. That was until I shared my stubborn refusal to confront my feelings, through the avoidance of outwardly innocuous, everyday habits. Then, we couldn’t get our stories out fast enough. And when I asked around, that was just the beginning.
There was the woman who said she feels her heart racing every single time she says goodbye to her parents; another who found herself feeling panicked during her maternity leave, as the difficulty in leaving the house with her new baby reminded her of when she couldn’t. Then there was the friend who had a panic attack when her mum didn’t answer the phone, as it reminded her of when she – as her mum’s primary carer – lost all of her usual daily support, and had to shoulder the weighty reality that her mum’s safety was all on her. I was told how supermarket check-out beeps were a trigger for someone who had been hospitalised with Covid, and another, who used to love raving but could no longer be in crowds without panic gripping at her chest.
These weren’t recollections from 2022. Or even 2023. They were from the past few months. And, as I continued with my information gathering, I found even those who didn’t have a specific trigger to share did admit to something vaguer; a nameless sense of unease, anxiety without a clear source, an unsettled something that just didn’t exist before 2020. From friendships drifting to relationships failing and, in some cases, rash decision-making, what seemed to unite everyone was a feeling of tiredness, overwhelm and emotions just feeling a bit… ‘off’. If the body holds the score, what are we, consciously or subconsciously, carrying from that time? What will happen if we confront it? Are we in a state of collective grief, in denial about that time’s impact? If so, is it really the best idea to just ‘Keep calm and carry on?’
IN DENIAL?
An anonymous building, just behind Paddington station, is home to tens of thousands of stories. It’s here that the Every Story Matters is housed, which – as part of the public inquiry into the pandemic – aims to gather as many personal experiences as possible, from across the UK, that will then become evidence that’s examined, and learned from, to minimise harm in the future. ‘We wanted to hear from anyone who had been affected – and that’s all of us. So, we’re talking 67 million people,’ explains Lizzie Kumaria, who runs the programme and has spent the past two and a half years reading the stories submitted to the inquiry, as well as travelling up and down the country to meet people in person at public hearings.
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As we speak, I glance up at the framed picture above our heads, of hand-painted hearts, on a grey wall. It’s of the National Covid Memorial Wall, which stretches for a third of a mile along the south bank of the River Thames. There are approximately 245,000 pink and red hearts, each representing a life lost to Covid-19. It’s a visual representation of something so incomprehensible it can be difficult to grasp.
But what can also be difficult to grasp is a sense of loss or sadness that can’t be identified. Even if we were lucky enough not to lose a loved one, or face ongoing health effects, the ‘everyday’ struggle is often brushed under the carpet. Instead, we make light of the banana bread we baked, the jigsaws we put together and the Zoom quizzes we joined. ‘We see a lot of people who will come in and say, “Oh no, I didn’t have anything challenging happen to me,” as they’re comparing themselves with others they see who were “worse off”,’ says Kumaria. ‘But then, once they begin to talk – and we don’t try to push people to open up – the stories come out, of perhaps having to go to hospital and give birth on their own, or people who lived alone and couldn’t see their friends or family. We see how that impacts their mental health now.’
This rings true for me: during lockdown, and in the years that followed, I very slowly unravelled. But, instead of acknowledging that and dealing with it, I constantly told myself that I was ‘being silly’. I felt like I was losing grip of my life, in all these big and small ways, but couldn’t identify how to put into words what I was really feeling. I’d lost something but couldn’t figure out what. Perhaps a sense of who I was.
When I describe this to Robert Neimeyer, director of the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition, he explains the concept of an ‘ambiguous or an invisible loss’. This is a loss that comes without cultural support, and therefore, he explains, ‘may be hard to name and claim. There’s no funeral for the loss of a job or an opportunity, or even the sense of oneself’, he says. ‘There are tangible losses, but then there are also abstract losses, such as “I didn’t get to go to my graduation.” We all had to face up to our own mortality, [and as such] we all lost the trust that we had that life is predictable, and that we have a measure of control over our lives, our choices and actions.’ He says that being unable to identify what it is that we’ve lost, or why we feel the way we do, makes it incredibly difficult to process, as what we experience instead is a ‘nebulous fog that just rolls forwards, without any clear shapes to it’.
A few years after lockdown lifted, Alys, 29, found that not having the right words to describe how she was feeling was sending her on a downwards spiral. ‘During lockdown, I became very “good” at masking my feelings, in an unhealthy way,’ she says, explaining how living alone meant that she didn’t have anyone to check in on her, or see how she was when she wasn’t on a video call. ‘I would be stress vomiting and crying, and then I’d come on a call and act entirely normal. I thought to myself, “I don’t know how to talk about this,” so I just… didn’t.’ She began to self-harm and phoned her doctor, but found that even when her doctor suggested antidepressants, she turned them down, saying, ‘No, I’ll be fine. Other people are much worse off. I’ll deal with it.’
Talking about our problems is so often the first step in facing them, but when everyone is going through something similar, I found it led to a collective silencing of our problems rather than an opening up. ‘We were all going through the same thing but in totally different ways. One friend was living with her boyfriend and they were arguing all the time. I was on my own,’ explains Karina*, 31, from Glasgow. ‘Another was going stir-crazy with her kids. Normally, we talk about everything, but it was like, suddenly, we couldn’t understand each other.’ Karina says that only a few of her friendships have gone back to how they were before the pandemic. ‘I saw a bunch of them the other week and it felt like we were all just being so polite with each other; it’s like we’ve all stopped being honest.’
Dr Neimeyer says swallowing down our problems in the face of trauma is very common. ‘Avoidant coping tends to be the predominate way,’ he says. ‘The irony of Covid is that we have all experienced comparable losses, yet none of us can speak about it. You’d think the commonality would open the door to mutual consideration, but it can shut it sometimes.’ He also points out that when we’re faced with our own mortality, and the frailness of life, multiple studies have shown that we tend to fall into two camps. ‘The paradox is that we may respond, on one hand, with a sense of our enhanced vulnerability – and with that a tendency to engage in protective behaviours, such as not getting involved with others,’ he explains. ‘But then the reverse is that you get people who throw themselves into situations of higher risk.’
For me, part of my aforementioned unravelling involved hurling myself into unsafe situations. It felt like my previous judge of character, and ability to recognise when I was in danger, had disappeared. And because of that, I felt the need to ‘test’ it. But what I couldn’t see was that this was an emotional reaction to the pandemic; instead, I saw it as just ‘having fun’ after going through a really hard time. It’s only now, researching this feature, that I can see my behaviour for what it was: an almost involuntary reaction to a difficult time, and my own denial of that was what kept me trapped in a loop.
LOST TIME
Having conversations for this story has, at times, felt just like Dr Neimeyer described it: like I’m asking people to peer into a thick fog. Many of the women I spoke to felt more anxious and unsure of themselves but struggled to pinpoint exactly why. But, one thing that kept coming up, over and over again, was a sense of having lost time.
‘I keep doing all this maths in my head, trying to rearrange my own timelines,’ says Geri*. ‘I’m 36, single and I want children. But I also always thought I’d get married and be married for a bit before kids. Now I just…’ she pauses, and shakes her head. ‘I think I might not meet someone in time. That scares me, but I also don’t know what to do about it.’
‘Prior to the pandemic, I think most of us just took our time for granted. We didn’t really think about it, we just existed,’ explains Ruth Ogden, who, as a professor of the psychology of time at Liverpool John Moores University, studies our relationship with time and, of late, has been conducting research into how the Covid pandemic impacted it. ‘That was then taken away from us. We couldn’t make the same decisions when it came to our time, and it felt like we’d “lost it”. I think the long-term implications of that are far reaching. For women, this impact is seen, as so much of our lives is governed by milestones – some of which are biologically driven and some are societally driven. And while everything stopped during the pandemic, that, arguably, took away one or two years of women’s opportunities to meet those milestones.’
She explains that when we’re faced with time pressure, it really impacts the quality of our decision-making. ‘This could be short-term, say when you’re in work and you’ve got lots of stuff to do, so you make silly decisions. But we can also see it in longer-term lifetime experiences, where that risky decision could be getting married, even when you have doubts.’ When you think about this, alongside our lack of words surrounding ambiguous losses and how we tend to react when faced with our own mortality, is it any wonder that many of us feel like we’ve been thrown in at the deep end? And in an attempt to get ourselves out, we’re floundering and grasping for a whole host of coping mechanisms (some of which are not very helpful or healthy) in the process. Even if we don’t want children, or a relationship, this combination of both lost time and a loss of trust in our control over the world can cause a clusterfuck of emotions. ‘Since lockdown lifted, I’ve been grabbing at every experience possible,’ explains Jennifer*, 29.‘This has been amazing, but I’ve also scared myself at times. I’ve had some incredible moments, such as partying backstage at festivals, but I’ve also found myself going along with certain things at sex parties that I wasn’t entirely comfortable with, just because I feel like I should be “doing it all”, I guess. And just because I can now.’
For Ella*, 21, even looking back and trying to figure out what happened during lockdown is a blur. She was 16 when it was announced and had just entered a relationship with her boyfriend. ‘Life would have looked quite different for me had lockdown not happened,’ she says. ‘I was sneaking out to see him, and Mum offered me a choice – either move in with him or stay. I was head over heels in love, so in the end I chose him.’ The abuse started slowly, with small warning signs like him not allowing her to have male friends and blocking her friends while she was asleep. ‘I didn’t have social media, there was no wi-fi in the caravan, so I was completely cut off from the outside world,’ she reflects. ‘By the time lockdown lifted, it was like emerging from under a rock. Even getting in contact with old friends, their lives had changed so much.’ The abuse had escalated to a point where Ella tried to leave multiple times, but the combination of lockdown and the way her abuser had manipulated the situation to shut her off from her friends and family made it very difficult to leave. ‘Afterwards, I was terrified to enter relationships and arguments, both of which would take me right back to that moment,’ she says.
With support from Women’s Aid, Ella is now moving on from that relationship and has a baby boy. But she still feels like time has been ‘stolen’ from her. ‘I don’t blame my mum at all, but if lockdown hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have rushed into that relationship and remained trapped within it.’
When lockdown lifted, there was a sense that we could all adapt and get right back into the swing of how things were before. But for many of the women I’ve spoken to, it wasn’t that easy. And it still isn’t, as they find themselves grappling with an immense feeling that they’ve changed. ‘It’s like who I was before the pandemic and who I am now are entirely different people,’ Jennifer muses.
ANOTHER OUTLOOK
The day lockdown was announced in the UK, Bayley Turner was already boarding a plane. She had been working in the theatre industry and, luckily, made it back to her home town of Melbourne, Australia, just in time. International borders were closing fast and quarantine initiatives were being put into place. ‘After a month of being back at home, I realised I was transgender,’ she says. Bound to a 5km radius in the most locked-down city in the world, she says, meant she could go through her transition in peace. ‘People seem to have forgotten this now, but at the time, there was a very real sense that we might not make it through this. There was something about knowing that I might run out of time to live authentically, and there was nothing to avoid the truth with. I found that I was happy – and the key to my happiness was womanhood.’
While Bayley’s situation is unique to her, perhaps the journey of self-discovery she experienced, as well as the joy she found in shedding old layers of herself, is something we can all try to channel in some way. Being able to accept loss – whether ambiguous or concrete – without judgement or avoidance, and allowing those feelings to live alongside moments of happiness and curiosity, is a skill that anyone who has known grief will be familiar with. Indeed, all the grief experts I spoke to for this feature agreed that no matter what we lost, all loss is valid. We can’t deny our feelings by playing a game of one-upmanship. But, if we ever want to move on, we have to face the reality of that time. ‘It’s about being willing to step closer to, rather than further away from, the fears. As when we move forwards fearfully, we typically do so in ways that limit our boldness,’ explains Dr Neimeyer.
‘A good question for people to ask themselves is, “How have I changed? Which changes would I describe as for the better? Maybe I’m sadder, but I’m wiser,”’ he explains. ‘One of the things we looked at was the degree to which people, post-pandemic, experienced not only post-traumatic stress, but also post-traumatic growth. That growth had many facets, which included having more compassion for human suffering. There’s often a sense that we’re stronger having survived this threatening experience.’
But, above all, we can’t keep pretending that period of time did not happen. We need to stop placing our emotions in lockdown and start talking. I’ll begin: I’m still suffering, are you?
Catriona Innes is Cosmopolitan's Commissioning Director, you can follow her on Instagram here. She also writes a newsletter that discusses all different forms of grief, which you can find here.
Kumaria and the team at Every Story Matters are still collecting stories to help the UK Covid-19 Inquiry and they want to hear from you, no matter what you experienced, at covid19.public-inquiry.uk. If you need someone to speak to, Samaritans is also on hand for anyone struggling, even if you do not feel suicidal, and can be reached for free at any time on 116 123
Catriona Innes is Cosmopolitan UK’s multiple award-winning Commissioning Editor, who has won BSME awards both for her longform investigative journalism as well as for leading the Cosmopolitan features department. Alongside commissioning and editing the features section, both online and in print, Catriona regularly writes her own hard-hitting investigations spending months researching some of the most pressing issues affecting young women today.
She has spent time undercover with specialist police forces, domestic abuse social workers and even Playboy Bunnies to create articles that take readers to the heart of the story. Catriona is also a published author, poet and volunteers with a number of organisations that directly help the homeless community of London. She’s often found challenging her weak ankles in towering heels through the streets of Soho. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter.
