So we've started. I mean we were kind of in lockdown since Monday afternoon anyway. We saw Jane and Sam for an outdoor-sitting-a-long-way-apart-morning-tea, to plan things and since that just the four of us. But we've started full enforceable by law lockdown. We're in it.
I feel tired and a bit jittery. Two nights ago I got something in my eye just as I was falling asleep and thought sleep will wash it out. So I slept and woke with one tiny eye and a lot of puffiness around it. Sleep did wash whatever it was out. The puffiness has gone down and my eye has got bigger, but it has added to a feeling of general dis-ease, of being not sick but not quite well either. Louise Hay would ask, what am I not wanting to see. I feel a bit worried or perhaps I feel very worried but distant from it. As if I am under water. I am having to deal with some stressful voluntary work, and my attempts to de-stress the situation backfired, and some pressured paid work, and those things feel like distractions, like distancing mechanisms. I feel like my job now should be The Lockdown. Every morning I should get up and report to duty for The Lockdown and every week the government should send us our Lockdown cheque sufficient to support our basic needs. This is so huge. There is the lockdown, and already people are talking about it being extended, that four weeks won't be long enough and that worries me. I want to see my Mum. I want my kids to see my Mum. My kids need air and variety and friends and learning. People being lonely. People dying alone. People being in lockdowns which are safe from the virus but not safe from the people they're locked down with. The way social connection is what makes us human. What is going to change over this four weeks? What will we be like at the end? I worry. And then there's the infection itself, another 78 new or probable infections in NZ today. It is hitting New York "like a bullet train" and it is "exploding" in Tokyo, and there are 470,000 global infections now and more than 21,000 deaths. And nowhere including New Zealand enough ventilators or ICU beds and nurses saying they are being told not to wear masks and they feel unsafe. And our public health system so underfunded for so long. There were crises before a crisis hit. All that worries me. And then there's the poverty. There's already homelessness and poverty in New Zealand, and people being hungry, and people working three jobs just to stay afloat, and we're not in depression or recession. We've been growing. It's been normal. But a depression is thundering towards us, galloping full pace, like a rhinoceros or a demogorgon. And the way things are arranged the people who it will hurt most are the people already hurting. Economic resilience is directly related to the amount of change you have had in your pocket after you paid your weekly bills. Some people will be okay though this thing. Some won't. Desperation will become more common. Our country will change. Like any event, it's a justice issue as much as anything, The benefits of supposed economic growth have fallen unevenly, so too will the burdens of a depression. And that, that worries me most of all.
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