My covid timeline continues at the point when I arrived at home from the beginning of May. I’ve just finished spending 2 months completely alone.

5 // relief

I honestly think there were times at home with my family where I felt better than I had done in a while, even before lockdown had started.

And actually I’m not surprised at all! I love spending time with my family, and the family pets of course.

I think I place a lot of pressure on myself to be an independent individual, to have a lot of friends and be living in a big city.

And actually, before lockdown, my social life was quite busy. If it hadn’t happened I think I would have had probably one of my busiest springs in terms of socialising.

I think in the past I’ve measured how well I’m doing based on how often I’ve socialised and I still think this is a good thing to do (although “me time” is definitely important too).

But one thing that strikes me is that I thought I needed a “social life” to be happy, but I found a different kind of social life at home with my family, and it was great.

And I’m so grateful that I can so easily go home and spend that time with them (depending on the state of lockdown - words that I never thought I’d be typing into a non-fictional blog post).

After months on my own, all I ultimately needed was to be surrounded by family.

When I was originally writing this blog post, I seemed worried about how I would be able to find this ever out-of-reach “social life”. I was worried about whether I could find happiness despite being cut-off from other people for the majority of the time. But now — in the midst of the second lockdown — I have a strong renewed sense of hope that things are going to be okay.

And if being alone is too much, I’ll head straight on home into the arms of my beloved therapy dog, Harri.

6 // reality

Okay, so I’m jumping around a bit because I forgot about this blog post and I’m writing it in the future. But let’s rewind to July 7th, when I started living in London again.

A few days after I arrived back in London, my flatmate soon joined me, traveling from Edinburgh where he had been staying for 4 months.

Socialising has suddenly been un-canceled and reinstated as a legal thing to do. This was amazing. Finally we could meet up again and see each other’s actual faces, hence wanting to come back to London in the first place!

Back in July, I was questioning myself:

• Am I “surrounded by family”?
• Do I still want to escape? Is escaping the right thing? Is it even possible? Am I in a state of denial again?
• How can I make more decisions that I can be more sure of?

It seems the running theme here is a lack of confidence. Something I soon felt the need to get help with amongst other things through weekly therapy sessions.

Meanwhile, the whole “50% off your bill” thing during August was on and I was loving it, going out maybe three times a week with friends to bask in the glory of discount restaurant food.

I also started dating again, which happens about twice a year, I’d say.

2.5 months later and here we are in lockdown II, with mixed news of cases on the rise in certain parts of the country, but vaccine trials being completed with 90-95% success rates.

There’s certainly a lot to be hopeful about.

I think I will leave that to another post, because this time around I feel much more optimistic about living alone and I’d like to write about the ups-and-downs of these last few weeks.