The Breaking of the Figurative Bottle

19 months ago I wrote a post that I never believed I would have cause to write. Now, nearly 19 months to the day, I have had the rug pulled out from under my feet and once again I find myself tossed onto an emotional rollercoaster that I can’t control. My original post, Message in an Internet Bottle, goes into a bit of detail about what happened so it’s worth giving that a read if you don’t know the backstory.

Anyway this week I found that I had been blocked from all of the ‘bottle sender’s’ social media account’s without warning. Not just unfriended but blocked. Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t online bff’s or anything but we had a few conversations after her initial contact in August 2018 and we would ‘like’ photo’s of each others dogs, say happy birthday and I sent genuinely heartfelt congratulations when she got married last year. I was once again shocked and hit with this huge change out of the blue.

Now, I know that being blocked on social media by someone shouldn’t really be a big deal. We didn’t even connect that much anyway but somehow, subconsciously, I think I felt that if she was happy to have me on her ‘friend list’ then she had truly forgiven me for past events. It felt secure and safe I suppose. But now the security has gone and here comes the anxiety. What if I have done something to upset her? Posted something she was offended by? Oh my God what can I have possibly done? WHAT HAVE I DONE?? And obviously this goes around and around and around in my head because I don’t think like a normal person. I think like someone with Bipolar and anxiety who worries about everything and when there is nothing left to worry about then I’ll worry about that too. Rational people will, I’m sure, have reacted to this situation in a very different way. The part of my brain that is capable of thinking logically is aware of this and I grab on to a tiny piece of rationality and keep a tight hold of it. Unfortunately the fluidity of my brain washes over the logic like waves lapping over a beach until all traces are gone and only the madness is left behind.

So this is where I am now. Wandering in a no-man’s land, half of me thinking ‘fuck you’ and trying to not care at all while the other half thinks ‘fuck you’ and is devastated. In a reflex action I fired off a quick message to her WhatsApp account – her phone number my only remaining contact option. Hindsight tells me that this was a mistake, although all I did was explain how shocked I was and that I sincerely hoped I had done nothing to offend her. I said I wouldn’t contact her again as she obviously didn’t want me to, although I would welcome her getting in touch in the future if she chose to and I wished her all the best. Now though I have an alternative note in my head which, although a large part of me wishes I would send, a larger part knows I would probably end up committed if I did. So now I’m stewing and unable to vent or let her know how I’m feeling and how, next time she decides to completely cut someone out of her life, it might be an idea to just give them a heads-up, at least if there is no obvious reason for it. Especially if they have a known mental illness which will escalate this simple act out of all proportion.

I discovered recently that I’m not alone in having the power to find things out. ‘Like a dog with a bone’ is probably the most accurate way of putting it. If I have a sniff of something I will go to any lengths to find out the whole story and when I have done so I can rest happy and content in the knowledge that I have the knowledge. This seems to be a Bipolar brain trait, and as one of the only positive ones I damn well intend to use it. Having had a dig around it looks like she has deleted a fair few people from her Facebook page, sharing something along the lines of ‘if I see some ridiculous post they’re gone’ as an explanation. Now I post plenty of ridiculous posts, actually most of them have at least a little bit of ridiculousness in them so maybe that’s it. Or maybe it’s because she was self-isolating with suspected Covid-19 and didn’t like my plea for people to fact-check before they blindly reposted Coronavirus information? Thats’s my biggest suspicion, that she thought for some reason that my post was aimed at her. Why she would have thought that or why that warranted blocking me absolutely everywhere I don’t know… Maybe in her illness she experienced a tiny amount of paranoia and lashed out?

My other suspicion is that she kept looking at my profile so she blocked me to stop her from doing it. I’m not pig-headed enough to think anyone would care about me but it was strange how she was always the first viewer on my Instagram stories. Even after a few months when she stopped being the first viewer she never missed looking at a single one. Not one!! I know people scroll through and see stuff they didn’t necessarily click on but this was something else. How could she be managing to view my stories within 30 seconds of me posting them? Every time? I found out a while after that you can set alerts for people’s posts and stories on Instagram. I’m not saying that’s what she did, I’m just saying it was a coincidence. Make of that what you will. I do speak from experience here as I had problems myself with obsessively viewing profiles at times. Thankfully I was able to stop myself from compulsively looking without resorting to blocking.

The final possibility is one that I really, really, really hope I am wrong about. Her husband works with a large computer software company and paranoia warns me that he has hacked into my phone, laptop, smart TV and anything else that’s connected to the internet. Obviously this would be highly illegal and I doubt he would even consider anything like that. Plus why would he even think to do it? Maybe if she asked him to? There wouldn’t be much to find so I can’t see it would be worth it. But this is a thought that I frequently have when I turn on the computer or look at my phone which is just lovely. I have even put a sticker over the laptop webcam. This is not a nice feeling to have.

Maybe she just decided she didn’t like me anymore? But even though she’s gone she isn’t really gone. I want to know what I did wrong, or if I did nothing wrong was there was another reason for her to erase me? I know she is still friends with mutual friends and I wonder what she is saying about me. She probably doesn’t even give me a second thought. I doubt she thought that such as small action on her part could cause such disruption. I feel like I have lost her all over again, although I don’t know that I even want her anymore. I am bereft and there is no one I can talk to. My husband knows the basics but he thinks we should never have been in social media contact in the first place so I can’t exactly open up to him and tell him I’m grieving for something I never had. I think I’ll be inexplicably tied to her forever, whether I want to be or not.

To Lockdown or Not To Lockdown?

Things are strange at the moment, stranger even than they normally are. And not just for me either. My country, along with many others across the globe has downed tools and closed for business – to a greater or lesser degree – as the powers that be decide the best way to approach Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19) and the virus which causes it, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS – CoV-2). For simplicities sake I’ll refer to both the virus and disease as simply Corona for the rest of this piece because let’s face it no one needs added complications at this time.

When there was initially talk about self-isolation and social-distancing measures I wasn’t concerned. After all I practically live in self-isolation anyway and rarely see other people except for my husband and parents. I was ready for this and it really didn’t think it would be much of a change for me at all.

And at first it wasn’t. My husband was still going to work and everyone was still going about their day to day business, all be it with a bit more distance between them. Then the panic buying started. People stockpiling loo roll, hand wash, anti-bacterial gel and any tinned/canned/dried food they could lay their greedy hands on. Supermarket shelves were bare, essential healthcare workers, fresh off a 14 hour shift found shops with nothing left to sell. The selfish grabbed whatever they could with no thought to anyone else. Supermarkets pleaded with customers to only buy what they needed and started limiting the number of loo rolls and hand sanitisers that any one person could buy at one time.

Some people didn’t think that the social-distancing rules applied to them. They still flocked for boozy lunches with bottles of wine or met mates for a few pints after work at the local pub. Groups of teenagers hanging around on the same parks that they always had took no heed of the warnings to maintain distance, if not for their own sake then for that of the poor bugger they would infect who could go on to become critically ill.

The Government decided that us humans were obviously too stupid to follow guidelines that were set for our own good and closed all pubs, bars and restaurants. Still people went out for a day at the shops, wandering along the local High Street without a care in the world and gathered in numbers previously unseen at nature reserves and national parks.

So now we are here. All but essential shops are closed. Everyone has to stay at home unless they absolutely cannot work from home. We are permitted to exercise outside of the home once a day, with walking, running or cycling being the authorised activities. Infrequent visits to buy food or essential medical supplies are permitted and there are queues outside supermarkets. Long snakes of humans standing two meters apart wait to be admitted to the store via a ‘one in – one out’ system. It has become necessary to implement special hours when the elderly and vulnerable can shop without finding empty shelves or having to fight crazed hoarders for the last pack of pasta.

In what hasn’t officially been called a lockdown we are, for all intents and purposes, locked-down. And still I thought I was ok. Husband is working from home so I’m not alone all day which I thought would be nice but in reality it’s just annoying and I feel like I can’t even speak to him as I don’t want to disturb him. I can’t see my parents and had to drop a Mother’s day gift off at the weekend from across the garden. Not being able to hug the ones you love and who you turn to in times of crisis is heartbreaking. What is worse is that anyone who is hospitalised with suspected Corona can’t have any visitors. None. Not even if the worse happens and they end up fatally ill. In their last moments on this earth they will be alone, their loved ones not even allowed to say goodbye. I can’t imagine how awful that must be. Well I can, but I am trying my hardest not to or I’ll cry again. There are frontline NHS staff working around the clock, unable to see their own families and in some cases even having to move out of the family home so they can continue to keep working in such a high risk environment. Home carers and those working in residential homes are not only at risk of contracting Corona themselves but of passing it to their elderly, unwell charges. There is no disputing that in this particular group of adults that infection is likely to be a death-sentence. Supermarket workers, after facing weeks of abuse are still there, scanning the nation’s shopping, being exposed to hundreds of people daily and still smiling while they go about their dangerous duties.

So, isolation is not what I thought it would be. I thought everything would stay the same for me but it really hasn’t. The thought of what is going on around the country, and around the world is filling my head and I can’t get it out. I am trying to distract myself with computer games and learning new things but my mind feels like a kaleidoscope, twirling and tumbling with images and ideas and I can’t get it to stop. Part of me feels like this is natures way of redressing the balance, or trying to restore the environment to a state where it can actually flourish once again. Humans have been gassing our planet for decades, choking the atmosphere with poisons that our endless thirst for industry have produced. Maybe our planet is fighting back, and choking us in return? Maybe it is just one of the natural cycles that the Earth goes through? I don’t have the answer but I do know that when all of this is over humanity needs to redress how we treat our world and each other because we simply cannot carry on as we had been doing.