COVID transformed me.
Okay, that’s bullshit. I’ve had COVID (probably twice…I didn’t bother to test the second time), and it was a bad cold. Not transformative.
What transformed me was not a sore throat, a mild fever or a bad cough. What transformed me was governmental and societal overreactions to a sore throat, mild fever and a bad cough. A mental health problem, undiagnosed for decades, metastasized into a breakdown, and transformed into a crisis.
Lockdown isolation took me literally to the razor’s edge of suicide, and though I survived, my reclusive nature was transformed into hermitage.
If I were single, becoming a hermit would be fine, maybe even great. As a married father of three, it is…not. My wife and kids deserve more.
I deserve more.
Yesterday I wrote about testing myself by going into the heart of darkness for the first time in four years, to see if I can recover something lost. NO, not something lost, something taken away.
It turns out I can.
Since declining to cut my own throat three years ago, I have been on a quest for transformation. My last transformation was done to me, this one will be done by me.
I am examining what changed. Asking questions like:
- What is gone?
- What remains?
- What do I want back?
- What do I want to let go?
This blog is a reflection of that. I have oft transformed my writing over the years, according to my whim of the day.
Now I set out to transform it again.
In the past I focused on writing about some certain topic.
Today I begin to focus on writing itself. Today I begin to focus on becoming a writer.
I too have lost something from the COVID years but I don’t think I’ll every recover what has been lost. I was listening to Jordan Peterson talk about how anybody could be the sadistic Nazi guard at a death camp. I thought about the mask police and the social distancing police. And who can forget the vaccine police. Some institutional players at the top, a lot of useful idiots under them and millions of my fellow Canadians quite willing to be standing on guard for themselves. That’s what fear and revulsion does to people. Fear that the person next to them breathing close to them will infect them and kill them. Revulsion of their fellow citizen if he/she won’t dance the COVID dance.
I’ve lost trust in just about every institution I can think of. And the media. Sure, we had our community of like-minded souls but we’re a minority with unacceptable views
So if they can take it all away from me anytime I have to accept this or move some place where this is less likely to happen in the future. It will be a big change but it has to happen.
It isn’t even what was done to me. It was the willing, cowardly, stupid compliance of the majority. It makes me sick to this day.
Hey there other Andrew, thanks for stopping by and for a great comment. A comment that might have been taken from inside my own head.
I had little faith in my fellow man and our institutions before COVID. Post COVID it is gone.
The worst part isn’t what they did to me, to us, it’s what they did to my children. Even if I were the forgiving type, THAT is what I can never forget, nor forgive.