week 1 self isolation down: unhomelikeness

You’re not a human doing, you’re a human being.

I’ve been following the progress of C-19 for a long time. Since around Jan 20th. I was in Japan, walking through a market in Tokyo & my American friend was messaging me how I might get quarantined on my way home. LOL I said to Hayley showing her the messages. “Americans, they’re so OTT. If it was a big thing, we’d have seen/heard it whilst here wouldn’t we?”

So we left Japan, & we weren’t checked out nor quarantined. Nothing was different. But I wish we had been. All of us coming home from Asia, 2 weeks at home & anyone we’d have contact with also kept at home. To keep it in check. Instead, here we are. On lockdown of sorts. Cinemas, cafes, pubs, restaurants, universities, and schools closed. Now, I believe this is the best thing and should have happened about a week ago given the rate of deaths we’re at (177 at the time of writing) and infection numbers of only testing hospitalized patients.

I’ve been self-isolating since last Thursday. Since before the government announcement of attempting to work from home if possible on Tuesday. I’ve been watching other countries and I know where this is going. I’m a person who is at risk. I have super bad asthma, and a bunch of other long-standing issues – that’s well documented on the pages here. So it’s been a week of only walking the dogs alone outside. Everything else in my bedroom and on Skype.

Now I’ve been working from home most of my adult freelance life. At least 2 days a week. So I should be used to it. But I will level with y’all, I have found this week really, really hard. By Wednesday I wondered why I was struggling given the fact that this was my normal activity last year.

The girl who lost most of 2012 and beginning of 2013 to insane fatigue and pain and spent around 8 months laid in bed most of the time, & when she wasn’t would just dream of being back in the bed – is now feeling trapped and uncomfortable in the same space.

I usually love working from home. No horrible Northern Rail commute, the money I save, a relaxed ease into the day. But this week? I can’t concentrate. I feel restless.  Every day I have to reassure my nan that if she takes the precautions necessary, she should be ok. And then I go back to my laptop and I stare down twitter with it’s 9 in 10 tweets about c-19. endless scrolling.

Tonight, whilst re-reading some texts for my PHD, i realized why I feel so uncomfortable being self-isolated.

It reminds me of being sick. And I am struck by the comparisons of the life people with chronic health conditions, disabilities and complex lives live every day.

I am not sick (not in the Corona way anyways) At the time of writing – i’ve been feeling the best i’ve felt in many many years recently. But I realize this lock-down, isolated life mirrors illness/injury in the same way that it affects our ability to be in the world.

Without real life interaction, even if it’s just me writing a bunch of bullshit on my laptop in Starbucks surrounded by strangers, it still feels like BEING in the world. I need some rhythm and rime, the beat of the street, i kinda need that Northern Rail community feeling to feel grounded. It gives my work the context it needs to feel tangible and real, otherwise — they’re just words on a page, drawings of things. Heidegger writes about this well in Being in Time. For him it makes no sense to abstract a paintbrush from the lifeworld of the human being in order to show that it’s mere an object made of molecules. The brush ceases to exist as brush if there is no human-being to use it.

 In other words, meaning and interpretation of our everyday ways of being in the world – underline and anker who we think we are and what we do.

Today we had a Skype with our newish Lab4Living Professor, Peter Llyod Jones, talking through his amazing catalog of varied work, underpinned by his scientific background but his understanding and need of combing art & design & all the other creative fields such as architecture and fashion to bring about the best most holistic and important/innovative works. He asked, “What does it mean to combine both science and art/design together and be a collaborator of both?”

The answer, of course, is simple: Science can in many ways explain *what* we are, but it cannot explain *who* we are and *why* we are.  We recognise beauty when we see it, we know when we feel pain and experience betrayal or joy. We don’t need technical explanations of these things in order to understand them or believe they exist.

The ubiquity of science’s usual calculative thinking can help give us a sense of freedom, and power of a ‘neutrality’ and it’s a sense of Truth. Presenting itself as the best, most sound, way of understanding ourselves and the world (it doesn’t).  So in theory, me being at home – hoping not to catch (or have previous caught & yet to get symptoms) c-19 – should give me a sense of agency in this. But bringing it back to that mirroring of chronic illness life, it does not.

When I was properly, pretty bed-bound sick – i learned fast what tending to the biological body does in medicine, it obscures what it means to *live* in that body, and what it *feels* like to be ill or injured, what it is like to experience the world differently – as ones embodiment shifts and changes.

As Jeffrey Bishop noted, Human life can not be reduced to mere functionality, without doing violence to the other features of being-in-the-world.  When you take away these contexts, or the ability to interact with it – it is a harm, a different kind of suffering.

We take for granted our interrelation of being-in-the-world, and when it beings to breakdown  – we feel like we’re falling out of our normal life. our of the world.

Whilst C-19 rages on, I made well aware of my “unstable body” – this self-isolation for longer, more necessity,  is just another sudden intrusion of the body into the everyday experiences. I’ve tried to explain in many different posts on this blog over the years about what it’s like to live in a body that keeps on changing? it can be frightening, sometimes even terrifying and always confusing. it generates this wild attention to your body that you never had before you was sick. One becomes a prisoner to any perceptible change — a cough, a lump, a pain. Predictability ends. You just grieve about the loss of it, allll of the time. Get forced to admit “new normals” when you just want the old normal.

C-19 is an equalizer in that it is forcing us to look and feel at our bodies and disruption of being in the world in the same way that illness & injury & other events do to others.

We have fallen out of the world, and most of  you have now joined me in what Susan sONTAG FAMOUSLY CALLED “THE Kingdom of the sick”.  But a lot of you aren’t sick.  you have to live a version of the sick kingdom life in order to either not kill other vulnerable people or not get sick yourself. Your way to project yourself into the world is disrupted.

And that’s what I am feeling. This wild uncomfortableness. Or kind of not belonging. An – what Heidegger called an “unhomelike being-in-the-world”. – the way we understand the world into which we know is thrown out.  Our world is no longer homelike, relatively stable. because illness (c-19 processeS) has disturbed our meaning making processes – it’s not just our body but the way in which we gain our being from/.

Having experienced serious illness – it leaves no part of your life untouched. Your relationships, your work, your sense of who you are and who you want to become, your future, your sense of life – and all these things change and it’s terrifying.

This creates a suffering.  The complex and profound suffering that is basic to the human condition – whether physical, mental, emotional, spiritual or otherwise – so something very few of us are willing to confront… fully.  It’s 1 of the reason why a lot of people have difficulty acknowledging friends are super sick, or people who are disabled continue to suffer great inequalities and injustices – because people can’t face their disruption because it means facing that it could also be them.  most of us would prefer not to dwell on the unpredictability of illness and death or the vulnerability of the human mind and body.

I feel like those who continue to keep going out, drinking in pubs having mass gatherings etc are turning away because they can’t deal with the idea of the suffering. They also don’t want to give up, momentarily, this ‘freedom’ that helps to give their world meaning and being. They also don’t want to experience what it’s like for so many people who are housebound due to social isolation, illness, and beyond.

And for me, here I am. In my bedroom. Not feeling real, not in the world. As noted many years ago, & multiple times on this blog – I have felt like I’m not going to make it to 35 (it was 30, but I got there). This feeling has been with me way before I got sick. Like with my poor background, it’s just a given. Now I am feeling it more than ever.  But with the long sickness, and now this – I have finally realized why the idea of dying without leaving a mark really bothers me. And why c-19 really frightens people.

When we can no longer project ourselves into our futures, we come face-to-face with ourselves – that our connection with the world is finite. What we’re really afraid of – is not so much the biological malfunctioning (tho that is scary) but the possibility of no longer to be able to *be* at all.

This kind of living takes away the privledges and luxuries of being to project secure and idealistic futures. It reveals the precariousness of our existences.

When I was so sick and couldn’t leave the house, it was fine because I had 0 energy. Now I’m finally getting my life back to a small part of what it was – and i’ve been thrown back into the life that sooooo many people have to live in, day-in & day-out. Without the imminent threat of C-19.

I see myself as an empathetic person, and i thought I had understood what it means to not be able to do stuff due to illness, to have your world broken and your place within questioned. But I finally think I get why it’s *so* dangerous for the elderly and the most vulnerable – who are relatively  bodily healthy – to be isolated and lonely from people, community, connection and activity. Because it breaks their being-in-the-world, it makes it difficult to ground yourself, and it feels very much unhomelikeness, within your own home.

I hope when we get to the end of this moment, that we will all reconsider how people are living and bring news way into helping connect people whose lives are already c-19 lockdown like.