To begin with, it implies a heightened urgency, a quantitative or qualitative shift in experiences. There is no clear evidence that this is true. Indeed, past societies framed their own anxieties about loneliness in strikingly similar ways. ‘Crisis’ also implies a moment of political and cultural flux, charged with transformative potential, whether good or bad.

The reality of loneliness over the last century is far more endemic and insidious. It has been visible (to the non-lonely, at least) in a series of fits and starts, with each generation of scrutiny and practice complicated and altered by a raft of historical contingencies; austerity policies or changing technologies being perhaps the most obvious. Attention wanes, empathy fades, and new ‘crises’ rise to the forefront of our consciousness. Most people have fundamentally made an uncomfortable peace with a world in which many other people are lonely, even if they work to mitigate that loneliness. It is no longer new, and rarely outrageous. It is usually just numbingly sad. With no crisis, no change. There never has been a moment in which anything could meaningfully and substantively change for the better.

There has already been much written on loneliness and COVID-19. My intention is not to replicate that valuable work. What is clear is that something very much like a genuine loneliness crisis is in the process of unfolding; in terms of severity, visibility, and the possibility for transformation. This crisis is caused by the COVID-19 epidemic, but is rooted in pre-existing contexts and histories, and entangled with both in messy and complicated ways. What I want to do here is to think through some of the more under-discussed implications of that entanglement, and begin to consider some potential responses. The intention is to move past some of the more usual points about the ill-effects of self-isolation and social distancing, or the good we can do by volunteering, checking in on people, and being kinder. Each of these are important conversations to have, but circumstances dictate that we need to go deeper.

***

Loneliness is endemic in society and has been for a very long time. This is the lens through which the current crisis has to be viewed. Understandably, there has been considerable discussion about who we might term the newly lonely, or newly at risk: previously well-connected people now having to wrangle with the very serious challenges posed by enforced isolation. There has also been increasing recognition that vulnerability to the effects of COVID-19 often coincides with vulnerability to loneliness, older adults being a case in point.

Chronic illness, disability, and homelessness each bring these two risks into similar proximity. There is a qualitative difference in how the COVID-19 crisis is experienced by people who have a reasonable chance of dying or becoming gravely ill. It is not just a global emergency, it is a direct, existential threat.

Regrettably, successful prevention of COVID-19 requires medium-term behavioural changes which make loneliness far more likely. This is (or should be) a relatively straightforward sacrifice to make for people who, mindful that some may die, suspect that they will probably be able to manage or mitigate these changes in one way or another.

When we consider loneliness as an endemic, pre-existing phenomenon, however, things become muddier. There are many people, including those to whom COVID-19 is an existential threat, who are unable to bear the possibility of feeling even lonelier than they already do. Loneliness has been an existential threat to them for a long time, and may provoke far more fear and anxiety than the possibility of infection.

In a situation where everything seems to shift from moment to moment, it can be difficult to get to grips with divergent temporalities. There are many people for whom the broad, public, collective timeline of COVID-19, the period in which it is understood as a global emergency, marks neither the beginning nor the end of their loneliness. It will certainly condition and alter it, and may even make some aspects more bearable. In my work on loneliness among university students with the sociologist Charlotte Jones, the students frequently speak about the yawning gulf between expectations and reality, and the shame and fear that everybody else is living this hyper-social, gregarious cliché. Suffering is individualised and compartmented, rendered personal when it should be political. At a time where experiences of isolation are at least superficially collective, this dimension could be dramatically lessened.

The solidarity and creativity stemming from this collective trauma, too, might well be of use. It may also be jarring to see neighbours who were previously distant offering support, or colleagues adopt strategies and technologies for communication which could have made a real difference earlier on. It will certainly be galling to worry that these things won’t last, to have little trust in their longevity beyond the immediate perception of need.

It is intolerable to put people with lived experience or heightened risk of serious loneliness in isolation without direct engagement with what that might mean to them and how it might be managed. Isolation in Britain is now compulsory, and the police have been granted powers to enforce it. Particularly now, there needs to be an immediate recognition that some people will find the government’s instructions almost impossible to comply with.

Not everybody who tries to maintain or replicate a semblance of their usual routine is selfish. For many, contact with friends or family members, the occasional drip of passing interaction, even just being around other people and feeling part of a shared humanity, can be a lifeline with vital psychological significance. Our response is that they should stay at home anyway – given the circumstances, this is broadly correct. But this has to come with the mindfulness that in some instances we are asking people to face unimaginable pain and suffering, and be accompanied by the all-important question: what can be done?

I don’t want to frame loneliness as a barrier to the effective containment of COVID-19. That positioning has the potential to do sinister work. The point is that nobody should ever have to choose between isolation which is unbearable and their ethical responsibility to avoid contact with others in a pandemic. Unbearable loneliness, which many people can expect to feel over the coming months, has a series of possible outcomes. It could cause them to break their isolation – sit in judgement on that if you can. It could also cause a rapid deterioration in mood or mental state, which may or may not be survived.

We are all reaching out to people we know that we think might need help. Many of us are volunteering, joining mutual aid societies, and doing far more for others than we usually might. This is all the more significant because it goes against the grain of the persistent neoliberal message – heightened by the pandemic – that other people can be reckoned with primarily as sources of risk and competition. The positivity around these good deeds is a welcome antidote to the constant tallies of infection and fatality, but with the best will in the world, it is not enough and it never will be. The UK government has a containment strategy, and an economic strategy. It needs a strategy for loneliness and mental health in the unique context of COVID-19, with research-led planning, engagement with multiple publics, serious funding for projects and services, and meaningful cut-through as quickly as can possibly be managed.

***

The loneliness caused or exacerbated by COVID-19 will outlast COVID-19. Although it seems dissonant to think about what comes after a crisis that is barely beginning, we know that loneliness is not just a response to external circumstances, apt to dissipate without harm when those circumstances change.

When Anna Lyndsey wrote of the ‘deformations of solitude’ in her 2015 memoir, Girl in the Dark, she gestured to a sense of being alone as a fundamentally transformative process. Loneliness is an experience by which people can be changed, with far-reaching consequences across the life course.

Habits of sociability and gregariousness can wither or be broken and new habits of avoidance and reticence spring up in their place; an earnest desire for withheld connection can shift into alienation and estrangement. When the emergency measures lift, many people will not feel able to re-enter their lives as if nothing had happened, as if they had never felt so alone. This fraught and difficult return needs to be planned and provided for.

Others will have no meaningful social lives to re-enter. Many will be bereaved, mired in a miserable mix of loneliness and grief. Many more will have been lonely before, with no expectation of things improving. If the society we had before COVID-19 is the model for what we attempt to reconstruct, then this watershed will have passed with its transformative potential spent.

Imagining post-COVID-19 futures requires a speculation about precisely what changes these intertwined crises could be catalysts for. The virus has certainly laid bare the fragility of many of our institutions and safety-nets, and underscored a series of damning ethical and political failures. Some protections which have been put in place are long overdue regardless of COVID-19. The hope is that they will be hard to withdraw later, and that COVID-19 will shine a light on other longstanding injustices and force a public and political confrontation of them, that this will somehow transform the societies that have lost so much. In this future, we continue to care for one another as fiercely as we will over the coming months. This is still a possibility, but it is one that must be tirelessly worked for.

Fred Cooper (@drfredcooper) is a Research Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter.

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I vaguely remember a time, in the wild old days of 2019, that in our glorious city of Melbourne life was normal, or whatever usually passes for normal. The Central Business District was its usual hotbed of people standing still in other people’s paths to text their partners about big issues, such as what to pick up for dinner. Delivery mopeds tangoed with traffic while bespoke-suit-clad senior public servants yawned in those long lunch recovery vehicles known as Ubers.

Baristas were, as they have and always will be, the city’s gods and guardians, cunningly disguised as ironically suspendered hipsters. Benevolently ruling our fair metropolis with a swish of caffeine scented steam, a stylish hand with latte foam, and beautifully pomaded handlebar moustaches, they kept the charmingly cobbled alleys of our great foodie city safe from invaders and those upstart Sydney-siders.

‘Feeling sick’, ‘being poorly’, were snuffle-soaked tissues of terms, usually dealt with by ingesting some minor meds and trotting off to work feeling like hell. Germs were then spread wholesale through keyboards, phone headsets and air conditioning to everyone in the workplace and their families, then their families’ friends and, eventually, the world as one knew it, finally ending with the barista gods closing the gates for a week or so, until the denizens of their city were once again safe – or so they thought – to order a short double shot Mac, no top up.

It was, in our pre-COVID innocence, the best of times. Because if the rest of Australia is surf and sun, Melbourne is single-roasted coffee beans picked by temple virgins in the fabled lost city of gold. And with a coffee on board, we can work through a pandemic, because with Melbourne coffee and Melbourne food, we scoffingly said there could never be a pandemic.

Or so we thought. But hey – we’re cool, but we’re not Delphic Oracles.

Because what we’ve emerged back into, as we tear down the blackouts, are new societal norms of company from the otherness of solitude.

Or, at least, many of us have.

Solitude for the chronically ill, or for those with a disability, or both, did not end with the all-clear. Nor does the rationing of loneliness suddenly stop. The business of being alone is endemic for those who are too tired, too unwell, or incapacitated due to a lack of support.

So many said of COVID restrictions that they ‘nearly went mad’ with the solitude. That the lack of physical contact, of ambient noise and chatter, almost broke them. But others… well, others saw that solitude can also hold beauty. For them, it didn’t need the reality of a health crisis to induce new habits. For many of these individuals, they learned a truth already evident to we who have no choice but to spend most of our time alone: solitude does not have to equal loneliness, and being alone can bring its own kind of grace.

Because even more evidently during lockdown, the world roared on 24/7. Streaming services. Podcasts. Virtual meetings. Visual calls to loved ones halfway across town, or halfway across the world. The urge to simply be still and quiet was so frightening to people that when we could (and of course in many places people couldn’t, and still can’t), we humans adapted to a life lived wholly via technology. It was the loudness of social get-togethers delivered via laptop and smartphone.

As Heraclitus said, the only constant is change. But a change into what?

When the initial COVID-19 lockdown was announced for Melbourne in March 2020 by ‘Dan the Man’, aka Premier Dan Andrews (currently not in great shape himself from a serious fall down some stairs), Melbourne – and I do say Melbourne, because often these lockdown restrictions were Melbourne specific, rather than Victorian – went into… well, panic. But weird panic. Buying enough loo paper to papier-mâché a substantially decent sized Work From Home suite. Stockpiling other odd items, such as dry pasta. And socks. Some individuals didn’t act well as part of a community in distress, and when we went into our almost four-month hard lockdown, behaved even less well.

Dressed in the same North Face active wear for the duration of the emergency – ours but to reason why – Dan was humble. Ubiquitous. And he had the face of someone who would never rat out his chums, despite a caning from the Headmaster. In other words, a good man in a crisis.

However, this being the human race (read: no batteries or instructions included), these same ‘Pandemic? I don’t see a pandemic. What pandemic?’ individuals with normal access to grocery shops, attacked these shops for withholding stores and ‘closing’. In fact the shops did not close but, just like pharmacies, petrol stations, and other essential services, rather communicated honestly and openly every day that nobody needed to stockpile; that there was more than enough food, alcohol (huzzah), medicine – you get the drift – for everyone.

But what has all this panic buying to do with solitude, I hear you ask?

Good question. I thought then, and still think, that the thought of being home alone so frightened some people that they behaved badly just to keep being seen.

I have a chronic illness and a disability. By virtue of this, I spend a lot of time in solitude – whether through fatigue, an immune system that lights up like a firework when a butterfly sneezes in the Amazon, extreme pain, or a shaken-not-stirred combo of the above.

I am often alone. I am often not seen. But I can say with absolute honesty this; I am not often lonely.

Those healthy, active individuals who reached this quiet revelation in the bizarre, artificial quarantine of the sofa, gained what I like to think of as a superpower.

The ability to enjoy their own company.

The hoarding, the shrill anger at being involuntarily housebound, reflected a lack of empathy on the part of some people without disabilities who, faced with time in an enforced lockdown situation, had the opportunity to learn what it is to live always, rather than for a few months, with solitude. Some used that opportunity; many didn’t, or (especially those with mental health problems) couldn’t.

Everyone – to a larger or lesser extent – has been affected negatively by the conditions imposed on us by COVID. This is a global disease, and it is nobody’s fault. It has created a worldwide disability; that of being unable to function in a normal, everyday manner. For some of us, everyday life sans global pandemic includes assistance with showering, dressing, walking… eating. This is part and parcel of what we face as members of a tribe of millions; the disabled and chronically ill. But with the onset of COVID, suddenly those who had never before experienced sanitary protocols had to learn how to wear a mask properly. To wash and use hand protection properly. To admit immediately when they were unwell and rather than hiding under the blankets with the cat to blow their nose on, get tested for it. Right now. Please.

Lockdown for most has, fingers crossed, become a receding memory of frenzied sourdough starters and rapidly abandoned monster jigsaws. But for those who understand solitude, rather than busyness, they’ll also appreciate the following.

For those of us trapped in our own bodies, lockdown is infinite.

And therefore, for many individuals and much of the time, so is solitude. We’re the old lags of the system, doing porridge for life.

I am rarely lonely. I am often alone, and in a place of solitude, but this is not frightening. It is peaceful. I am able to take time in calmness. Write, when my hands behave. Set up mock historical battles between the cats when they’re not. It took me a few years to figure out the loneliness versus solitude difference and, to be blunt, I’m not sure I ever would have if not for my disability. This is not to say I don’t find it tough. I do. But my point is this. I saw so many people without disabilities struggle during COVID – and who continue to struggle (I am so thankful Melbourne took such a hardline for selfish reasons, ie keeping me alive) – because they have never been restricted before in mind or body.

And I am genuinely frightened for them. We are seeing the mental health effects now on those who have been in long-term lockdown – and when questioned, not one of them said ‘I coped okay with the solitude’. And even though now, for many, restrictions have lifted, our psychologies of face-to-face life have changed, possibly forever. Some may gnash teeth and wail at this, and launch into a frenzy of activity; but others will sit somewhere quietly, rediscovering their own thoughts.

This is what illness brought me many years ago. I’m not saying I didn’t gnash my teeth at first, but gradually I learned to relish the solitude. Do I love it all the time? Of course not. I’m not a misanthrope. But it’s a reality, so why not revel in it?

So perhaps, just perhaps, when rattling away in a café, relishing the renewal of society (and good coffee -oh how I love thee, let me count the beans) while admiring the barista’s brand new suspenders, bear this in mind.

Don’t dismiss the occasional desire to choose a spell in solitary. It’s amazing what quiet does for the soul. But maybe, sometimes, call a friend who resides there permanently.

Lifers like to see the sunlight that is other people, too.

Kate Stone Matheson works within the mental health advocacy field, assisting workplaces to embrace and emphasise mental well-being, inclusion, and allyship. She is an ex-journalist, amateur photographer, current writer at her site A Difficult Woman, and, as someone with Young Onset Parkinson’s, a proud ambassador for Shake It Up. She currently resides in Melbourne, Australia with her husband, and is gradually coming to terms with a new outlook on life – from a wheelchair.

The post Coffee, COVID and Porridge appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Donne, who was then Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, was  quarantined in his Deanery bedroom. From there, all alone, he listened to funeral bells tolling. The sense of isolation was terrible.

As Sickness is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sickness is solitude; when the infectiousness of the disease deters them who should assist, from coming…Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself.

This experience inspired Donne to write his famous reflection on the natural unity of humankind. ‘I am involved in mankind as a whole,’ he wrote.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’

‘I am involved in mankind as a whole’. Today we are all involved in the fate of humankind as a terrible infectious virus spreads relentlessly across the globe. Here in the UK we  imagine that being an island nation, cut off from ‘the main’ except by boat, train or plane, will help to protect us from the Covid pandemic. Our government, like other governments of wealthy nations, buys up vaccines to protect the population. Meanwhile millions of people in poorer nations go unvaccinated, unprotected, and today we are all reaping the consequences.

Omicron, first detected by the excellent immunologists of South Africa, is spreading rapidly across the globe. We don’t yet know how serious this variant is for vaccinated populations but in countries without sufficient vaccine supplies infections are rising very fast. And until people in these countries have access to vaccines, the longer term picture is very bleak.

Dame Sarah Gilbert, Professor of Vaccinology at Oxford and a key figure in the development of the AstraZeneca vaccine, warns that unless the global community wakes up to the dangers it faces, the next variant of Covid, the next global pandemic, could be much worse than we’ve experienced thus far.

Sir Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust who recently quit the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) after expressing ‘concern’ at the government’s handling of the pandemic, writes in The Guardian (4 December 2021)

We will only bring this pandemic to an end by working together globally and sharing access to all the vital public health tools needed to reduce transmission everywhere and save lives. It is staggering and utterly frustrating that, two years on, governments still haven’t woken up and realised this is in their enlightened, shared self-interest.

It is ‘incredible’, Farrar goes on to say, that the World Health Organisation is still pleading desperately for funding to aid in ending this pandemic.

And what about our island nation, and its role in all this? A leading campaign group for a global vaccination programme, the People’s Vaccine Alliance, on December 5th released figures showing that 20m people in the UK have received booster or third vaccinations, while at the same time only 20 million people across 27 low-income countries have  been fully vaccinated. The inequality is astonishing, shaming and hugely dangerous to us all.

The Covid pandemic has been terribly hard on countless millions. Elsewhere on this website we have posted blogs that describe the impact of social distancing and enforced solitude on UK individuals and households. Even as people have recognised the need for such measures, the psychological and practical toll has been very high – much higher for some people and communities than for others. Covid has not hit all Britons with equal force.

But now we remind ourselves that on a global level, the terrible sufferings and losses resulting from this pandemic reflect unconscionable inequalities across the world, as rich nations continue to turn their backs on poorer countries. Will this change? Are our leaders frightened enough now to effect change?

No country is an island, all peoples – all of humanity – are part of the ‘main’. This island nation can no longer afford to be an island. Otherwise, for all too many of the global community, including us here in the UK, ask ‘not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.’

Barbara Taylor is Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London and Principal Investigator on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project. 

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It can be no less distressing for other residents of care homes who can hear and see in the media their enormous risk of death due to the government’s failure to provide testing for the virus or adequate protective equipment for them and their carers. Worse, they may know of friends dying within the care home, and they can themselves be refused the hospital care available to younger people if they contract the virus, though care homes can rarely provide the necessary medical treatment. Some homes are asking residents to sign ‘do not resuscitate’ documents, deepening their fears and feelings of neglect.

Discrimination against ‘the elderly’, the outdated term that is relentlessly used, is nothing new.

Those who think and care about them refer to ‘older people’, implying human diversity rather than a stereotyped, undifferentiated bloc above a certain age. In the current crisis, discrimination has been particularly blatant in government policy and some medical responses. The first official move was to tell everyone over 70 they were the group most susceptible to the virus and must self-isolate, as though all the millions past that age were equally frail and vulnerable. This was a severe shock to the very many fit and active people past 70, myself included.

Among other errors, it failed to recognize potential losses to the community if we all heeded it. There is justified congratulation of the numbers of people coming forward with voluntary support of those in isolation and in need, but it is little recognized how many people over 70 have been volunteering such support to their neighbours and others for decades, which will be lost if they withdraw into isolation. Very many older people are not frail dependents but invaluable contributors to their families and communities.

In normal times, people aged 65-74 are the most likely age group in UK to engage in voluntary work. They feel fit and active after retirement and want to be useful, and they have time, as younger people have now but usually do not.

28% of 65-74s volunteered regularly in 2018/19 and surveys show similar figures for the previous 20 years.

They help others formally through voluntary organisations, while many more do so informally, caring for relatives, friends and neighbours, often relieving those risking loneliness in solitude. They have been needed all the more following ‘austerity’ cuts to social and other public services.

These supposedly ‘vulnerable’ older people are keeping many public libraries open, and more and more people in their 60s and 70s care for parents in their 80s and 90s, or for frail partners or disabled adult children, often experiencing severe stress as supportive care services dwindle.

Over 2m older people in UK provide unpaid care; 400,000 are over 80, 1 in 7 of all people over 80. They are estimated to save the state £25bn pa in costs of caring services. 65% of grandparents care for grandchildren to help their children work, often giving up their own work to do so. I in 3 working mothers rely on support from grandparents due to the increasing costs of childcare.

And growing numbers of older people volunteer for overseas charities. Voluntary Service Overseas was established in 1956 to enable young people to volunteer in low-income countries after leaving school or university. Now they increasingly recruit older people.

In the 1980s only 3% of their volunteers were aged 50 or over, by 2008 they were 28%.

I don’t have more recent figures, though they are likely to have risen. As teachers, nurses, doctors, engineers, among others, they provide considerably more skill and experience to low-income countries than most younger people. Thus many older people avoid loneliness and alleviate that of others less active or fortunate than themselves, as part of their normal lives.

As this health crisis has progressed ,official edicts have changed and begun to recognize diversity among older people, that those with ‘underlying health conditions’ of any age are most in danger, not everyone over the arbitrary age of 70. It has become obvious that many younger people are dying, especially medical workers exposed by being inadequately protected, BAME people disproportionately, and men more than women. But the initial alerts have left many older people seriously frightened, afraid to leave their homes, not allowed to receive visitors, not always competent with technology to contact friends and relatives, experiencing solitude as fear and loneliness.

But if healthy older people have been delivered a bad time by government COVID policies, frailer people are having it worse. They will hear in the media that some hospital doctors refuse advanced treatment to save the lives of people past 70. The health service has a long history of such discrimination, judging older lives less worth saving than those of the young because they have few years left to live. They fail to recognize how many people are now living longer in good health, with potential for years of life at least as useful as many younger people. Sometimes doctors may act in desperation, forced to make hard choices because of overload of patients and/or inadequate facilities but, still, such discrimination is unacceptable.

Many doctors recognize this and, after much criticism, it now appears to be official policy to judge all patients by their state of health and potential for recovery regardless of age.

A possible good outcome of this crisis would be if it finally alerted us to the extent of discrimination against older people and its harmful effects. For decades, social care of older and disabled people has been under-funded and inadequate, especially since cuts and privatization by Thatcher in the 1980s, continued under ‘austerity’ since 2010. This now leaves many people isolated at home or stuck in hospital beds because there is no space in care homes.

Repeatedly since 1948, when present structures were established, official and unofficial critics have urged integration of universal, free health care and means-tested, locally variable, social care services into a free, adequately funded, service to give frail older people the care they need and deserve. But they have been persistently ignored by successive governments refusing priority to the needs of older and disabled people.

Many people are frightened and disturbed by the COVID crisis, but older people have reason to fear it most, due at least as much to government and medical policy and practice as to the virus itself, adding to the danger of depression in self-isolation. Even if they try to cheer themselves by escaping for the permitted daily walk, the benches in the local park may be roped off, for fear that sitting somehow encourages contagion.

Older people may need to rest on a half-hour healthy walk, but again their needs were forgotten, deemed less important than others, heightening fears of marginalization and isolation, the worst kind of solitude. Then, at last, on 17th April, following protest, senior police announced that ‘it is acceptable for a person to stop for a break in exercise’. Let’s hope it makes life easier for some people.

Pat Thane is a Visiting Professor in History at Birkbeck, University of London. She has written extensively on old age and ageing, including Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues (2000).

The post COVID-19 – Killing Off Older People? appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

This paper will discuss evidence on loneliness among family carers from Caring through Coronavirus, an interdisciplinary research project led by Dr Siobhan O’Dwyer at the University of Exeter Medical School. It considers tangled histories of loneliness and care, explores narratives from family carers during the COVID-19 pandemic, and situates carer loneliness within broader political structures of marginalisation and abandonment.

This seminar will take place online.

All are welcome but booking is required. Please click here to register your attendance.

The post Seminar – Fred Cooper on ‘Family Carers, Loneliness, and COVID-19: Preliminary Findings from ‘Caring through Coronavirus’ appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Prisoners of war experienced social isolation and displacement for lengthy periods of time, and left a variety of sources describing the psychological impact of distance and dislocation. Kept at a distance from the immediate fighting and the possibility of death in battle, British P.O.W.s nevertheless found themselves separated from their homes, families and normal lives for an indefinite period of time. Boredom, loneliness and isolation were widely felt as prisoners attempted to fill their time and keep in touch with those distant from themselves. As time wore on P.O.W.s began to describe themselves as ‘Stalag happy’, a term used to express feelings of irritability, fatigue and depression related to lengthy imprisonment.

Neurotic symptoms had been observed in prisoners during the First World War, and by 1939 it was accepted that the abnormal conditions of captivity could lead to psychological distress. Adolph Vischer, Swiss surgeon and expert on prisoner neurosis, claimed that while solitary confinement was known to have an adverse mental impact on civilian prisoners, the ‘confinement in mass’ practiced in P.O.W. and internment camps could be just as damaging.

‘Loneliness in the midst of company’ was destabilising, as prisoners chafed at the lack of privacy while simultaneously longing for more familiar companions.

Too long in captivity and it was feared that these feelings of distress would result in permanent personality changes. According to army psychiatrists, prisoners kept captive for lengthy periods were at risk of ‘great changes which prove very much more difficult to reverse’, including but not limited to ‘deep and serious bitterness’ and ‘marked social anxiety or loss of confidence in social relations and situations’. ‘Barbed wire disease’ resulting from prolonged imprisonment and absence from home could produce a myriad of symptoms, but central to this emergent illness was a sense of social anxiety and difficulty engaging with others. Many P.O.W.s described experiencing strange dreams, a phenomenon recently reported in the media among those locked down due to coronavirus [1].

At a primal level, the isolation and emotional deprivation of a prison camp robbed individuals of their ability to act as social beings. Psychiatrist Henry Rollin claimed in 1948 that symptoms in prisoners were produced by their inability to satisfy ‘emotionally saturated urges’. Captives were deprived of relationships which could have provided them with ‘compassion, tenderness, understanding and comfort’, and their natural aggression was turned inwards resulting in ‘inertia, apathy or depression’. The natural urge ‘to make something of life’ was frustrated inside ‘the sterile vacuum of prison’.

The misery could ultimately lead to a total breakdown in morale. Tom Main, psychiatrist and pioneer of group therapies for mental illness, compared captivity to the evacuation of children and wrote that the removal of individuals from their existing community ‘produced among some of the people so displaced a loneliness and confused distress and a dissatisfaction with their new strange society that expressed itself in poor standards of conduct’. Feeling this dislocation, prisoners attempted to keep their connection with families and friends alive by writing home as frequently as possible. Respondents were allowed to send ‘snapshots or unmounted photographs of a personal nature’, and POWs frequently reported that they talked to or kissed these photographs as physical traces of home.

Beyond letters and photographs, prisoners attempted to include themselves in the communities they had left in any way possible. Sundays were known among prisoners as a time for ‘re-living’ their lives at home and daydreaming of spending the day with their family acting out the usual routine. Some prisoners even attempted to synchronise activities with those still at home, for example going to bed at the same time or writing to each other on the same day [2].

On the home front, P.O.W.s’ families were reassured that they were capable of mentally adapting to their new surroundings and enjoying themselves within the camps. The Prisoner of War magazine issued to prisoners’ relatives informed readers in May 1942 that:

Probably all the time their lot is nothing like as bad as you think. They have accepted the routine of their new existence and get as big a kick out of the latest Red Cross food parcel or the new books in the library, or the latest letter from home, as ever you got out of a new frock or the latest Leslie Howard film.

At the same time, relatives were frequently reminded of the importance of letters to the prisoners’ morale and their responsibility to keep in touch.

While those behind barbed wire hoped that liberation would bring an end to their feelings of isolation and ennui, many were sorely disappointed. British prisoners of war spent up to five years longing for their release and repatriation, but many experienced distress on their return. Official reports noted that repatriated prisoners were ‘disillusioned by the contrast between real life at home and the romanticised versions of it which were common in the enforced day-dreaming of stalag life’.

Psychiatrists described this period of depression as ‘the normal reactions of the individual to disillusionment, following a form of social isolation and absence from home’. Having spent significant amounts of time dreaming of familiar company and home fires, repatriated prisoners found themselves craving isolation and solitude. Many reported an inability to tolerate the company of friends and neighbours, even for a few minutes.

In the current pandemic, psychologists have warned that with the end of ‘lockdown’ people may find a return to sociability more difficult than expected. Countries ahead of the U.K. in their release from restrictions have reported a rise in demand for mental health services, as immediate elation is followed by disillusionment and depression [3]. Those expecting to exit their homes to find their relationships and ordinary lives unaltered may be in for a rude awakening.

Repatriated prisoners described a process of adjustment as their horizons expanded beyond the limited world of the camp. G.C. Pether, writing in the Lancet in 1945 to describe his feelings upon being liberated in 1918, said that after years locked away

the sensation of moving as free men was strange and alarming… For so long had the barbed wire confined them that many felt uncertain of themselves if they went more than a short distance from home.

At the same time many repatriates were dealing with a sense of loss, as the world they re-entered was very different to that they remembered. Prisoners interviewed after their return noted that ‘England in wartime was very different from the pre-war England of their nostalgic dreams’. While we may see a further lifting of restrictions in the coming weeks, it will be important to take the post-lockdown world for what it is rather than looking back to a supposedly better time before.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/insomnia-and-vivid-dreams-rise-pandemic-anxiety-180974726/

[2] Claire Makepeace, ‘Living Beyond the Barbed Wire: The Familial Ties of British Prisoners of War Held in Europe during the Second World War’, Historical Research, vol. 86/no. 231 (2013)

[3] https://www.rte.ie/news/2020/0425/1134791-elation-then-disappointment-exiting-lockdown-in-china/

Gabriel Lawson (@GabeLawson95) is a PhD student in the Department of History at Queen Mary University of London. His research focuses on mental health, British prisoners of war and resettlement in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The post COVID-19 and Captivity appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

1.

I have lived alone for 35 of my 76 years. Whilst I was working in a busy and demanding health related job, I welcomed my time alone in the evenings, although I always spent some evenings with friends or on activities that I enjoyed, and I normally went out of London at weekends, to be with family or friends.

With retirement, I realised that I would not be happy or mentally healthy if I did not interact with people frequently. And arranged my life so that I had lots of things to do, including church activities, school governorship, girlguiding and investigating family and local history. I have lived fairly happily in this way for 10 years.

The only times when I felt lonely, tended to be after spending time with family or friends, especially holiday times: on my return to my solitary home, it would take me some days to settle down and adjust to being alone again.

Lockdown has had a huge impact on me.  Unfortunately, I had a serious illness in March, which I have had to deal with alone.  (Normally a member of my family would have come to be with me and help me organise myself in a new situation). Of course, I have talked to family, friends and neighbours and have been very well supported. However, the lack of my regular contacts where I could talk face to face, maybe have a cup of tea or distract myself with a shared activity has been very debilitating.

Although I have used phone calls, Skype and Zoom to join up with people, and chatted on the doorstep, and this is very nice, it does not replace the real communication of meeting. I have tried to use music, radio and television to ease the loneliness, and they are of course, a help but not the same. Many people are worse off than me, but it has been and still is an extremely lonely challenging time.

A regular routine has been advised for us all, and should help one’s stability, but the tedious round of daily routine can become self-defeating.  Although I long for life to return to some more normal pattern, I also worry that I will have lost the confidence to communicate easily with other people.

I’m a 76-year-old woman living in London.

2.

Before the pandemic, I felt lonely whenever I was alone and unoccupied for a few hours. I had a childish fear of being alone with my own thoughts and not having anything to distract myself. Since the lockdown, I’ve had to spend a lot more time alone, of course, and I’ve been surprised to find that I’m okay. After an initial flurry of contact from friends who were worried about how I’d be coping (I have a reputation for being extremely sociable!) I have settled into a calmer life.

Now, solitude has become more of a physical issue. I have virtual contact at work and with friends, so I don’t feel particularly isolated. But I envy characters on TV who can touch, I hug my friends in my dreams at night, and I find myself suddenly desolate after joyful video calls because I cannot sit next to my friend on a sofa in a pub.

I’m a 29-year-old woman.

3.

Solitude meant (and still to an extent means) the sense of being apart. I am almost never literally alone – I live, work and holiday in cities, and it is rare to be out of earshot of someone else entirely. But those lives are not intersecting with mine. Before COVID, I often dreaded long weekends, 3 days in which I might not have a conversation with anyone else. I’d restart the working week disoriented to interaction with others.

COVID has strangely made this easier: I’m no longer the only person who has experienced being alone within almost-touching distance of others.

I used to feel that my (pretty regular and positive) online engagements didn’t really count, whereas now almost everyone has come to value distant interaction. There has been more of it, for me – more people have noticed that I am alone, and worried about it, rather than assuming I am doing it by choice.

It has been interesting to contrast my negative feelings about isolation before the lockdown or on bad days in lockdown with a friend who likewise lives alone and had a very busy life before COVID, but who is perfectly unmoved by lockdown and doing fine, not missing anyone. I don’t have that mindset – I do miss people.

I’ve been in a long-term long-distance relationship for many years; it’s not perfect, but good when we see one another. So solitude in lockdown meant knowing we simply couldn’t meet for months. In one way, we’re very good at communicating at a distance. In another way, it was a dramatic, forcible separation.

He’d given me a stuffed animal a few months earlier (most uncharacteristic for both of us, really a joke impulse buy) and for the early weeks of lockdown it became a totem of his presence with me, which both of us referred to as comforting. I’m glad to say that has worn off a bit as lockdown has got more familiar and less stringent; I’m not talking to stuffed animals any more.

I’m 45 and live in London.

4.

Solitude before COVID seemed more peaceful and relaxing. Now it seems like the worst thing in the world as it is not through choice any more. I live alone so I have never had a problem with being alone but knowing I have to stay alone makes it worse. I think being in solitude through choice was okay because if I decided I wanted to see others and spend time with people, I could do so. Now I don’t like not knowing when I can next have be people over, or go and see friends and family. I feel more lonely now knowing that the other people I know aren’t in lockdown alone. I don’t know anybody else who is currently alone.

I used to have my work routine so would spend all day talking to people but now I can only speak to people over the phone or at a distance in their garden.

I’m 25-years-old and live alone in an apartment.

Our project is very grateful to everyone who took the time to tell us about their experiences. We are still collecting solitude testimonies for our project. If you would like to contribute, please click here to be taken to our survey. 

The post ‘Within Almost-Touching Distance’: Solitude and Physical Isolation appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

(Mary Wollstonecraft, 1796)

I want to be Andrew Scott’s mother. By ‘Andrew Scott’ I mean the award-winning Irish actor who played the hot priest in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. By ‘mother’ I mean mother, although Scott has a perfectly good mother already (Nora, a former art teacher). By ‘want’ I mean I desire to be Scott’s mother because in this mad pandemical world the line between the feasible and the fantastical has dissolved. Ordinary pleasures of a year ago – dinner with friends; going to a concert; cuddling a grandchild – have become impossible dreams. So why not dream the impossible?

I’ve never met Andrew Scott.  I think he’s a terrific actor: I loved him in Fleabag and everything else I’ve seen him in. In September he gave an in-camera performance at the Old Vic of Three Kings, a one-man play written for him by his former partner, Stephen Beresford. The play was scheduled for July 31^st but a few days before I got an email saying it was delayed by Scott’s admission to hospital for ‘minor surgery’. No details, except the issue was ‘not serious or COVID-related’. In early August I received another email saying Scott was still not well enough to perform.

The weeks passed and I became anxious. My younger stepson works at the Globe; one of his closest friends is a top director. His husband is a novelist who has written for the stage. Their world is full of thesps: could they find out what was wrong? No. I fretted more. I asked some friends connected to the London theatre world. No joy there either.

In early September Scott performed Three Kings, to rave reviews. I searched his face, was he really alright? By now it’s fair to say that I was Scott-obsessed. I viewed online interviews, checked out his personal history, re-watched him as the hot priest. Adorable.

I’m not given to infatuation with performers; Elvis in G.I. Blues was the last. But I know infatuation when I feel it. This was something different. It took me time to name it. It was mothering-hunger.

I’m not a mother. But I’m rich in stepsons, nieces and nephews, godsons and goddaughters, and now two grand-godchildren, born during the pandemic. My wife has four living siblings, with dozens of children and grandchildren between them. My COVID world is full of next-generation family.

But I’ve become greedy. I want to add Scott to the mix, I want him as my boy (he’s 44, I’m 70). My family will love him, and he’ll fit in well. Thespianism? We’ve got that covered. Queer? Yep, we’re good there. Irish? My older stepson teaches philosophy in Galway. Celebrity? One of my brothers-in-law is a famous haircutter; in recent interviews Scott reminds me of him, the same well-rehearsed casual charm, the open shirt, the finger-tossed hair. Another brother-in-law is a leading stunt director; for all I know Scott may have worked with him. So he will be right at home with us.

So why not? Desire is never reality-bound. And when desire confronts disease and death it can blaze up, reaching out to life, insisting on it, demanding more of it. I want Scott because he is more of what I already have. But my son Scott also represents what I will never have – a son of my own. Not once, in all my decades of childlessness, have I hungered for motherhood as I do now, to love a life born from me, now that death is everywhere around me.

Globally COVID-19 has claimed two million lives and rising. The UK’s death rate is one of the highest in the world. One friend has died from it, another has been severely disabled. People who lose loved ones to other diseases cannot come together to mourn them. My wife lost a brother to oesophageal cancer during the first lockdown. The same disease killed a close friend of mine in early December. He lived in Toronto and his partner is my oldest friend. I should be there with her now. What hellish fate has stuck me here in London while my dear friend mourns far away? A misery of separation that I’m sharing with thousands of others across the globe. My widowed friend has two sons who cannot put their arms around her. My stepsons and I cannot hug; we might kill each other. Love and death in close embrace: an eternal theme of literature, art, drama – now made a quotidian reality.

Life revolts. Fleabag shows a young woman seesawing between sexual encounters in the wake of her mother’s death and the suicide of her closest female friend. Finally she falls in love with a Catholic priest (Scott) who chooses God over her. Death has sent her careening toward the impossible. At one point, to cover for her sister’s miscarriage in the middle of a fraught family outing, Fleabag pretends that she’s miscarried. For her, there never was a baby. But it’s the priest’s ‘beautiful neck’ that she finds irresistible. Scott does indeed have a good neck, but who cannot find a baby’s neck irresistible?

Passionate sex after funerals is a well-known phenomenon. Female sexual desire is said to have increased during the pandemic. But eros takes many forms. Child-yearning, as Lucy-Hughes Hallett labels it in Peculiar Ground (2017), can be as exigent as lust. Will there be a baby-boom in the wake of COVID? Not for me; and anyway it’s not baby-mothering I want but a gorgeous actor-son who exudes playful vitality.

In interviews Scott repeatedly describes acting as playful. He loves Picasso’s famous remark that ‘It took me my whole life to paint like a child’. I don’t know if Scott has ever read the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, but for Winnicott play is the life-force. Play, in children and adults, is where dreams are enacted, where fantasy and desire find creative expression. In play, people become themselves, for good or ill, and this is exciting, joyful, dangerous. When Scott played Hamlet in 2017, he surprised audiences by showing the young prince as full of fun. Why this portrayal?

If you don’t understand that Hamlet had a great joy for life, if you think that for the length of time that he was on the earth he was always depressed, well the release from life isn’t really that tragic…[but] If you think it was somebody who was full of life, and engagement, and fun, that has now just been totally sucker-punched by grief and doesn’t want to be alive anymore, I think that’s much more telling, and much more of a consuming story. (Evening Standard, 26.11.19)

Sucker-punched by grief…an image for our times. So how do we go on playing in the face of disease and death, and fear of death? We reach out for what we have; we dream of what we want. Scott’s emergency surgery, back in July, triggered a new dream in me. Anxious for him, I clutched fearfully at what I already have – the family and friends I love – and conjured up an ideal supplement: a fantasy-son, fully recovered, to accompany me through this dark time to a play-filled life beyond.

*

A note on this blog:

Solitariness breeds fantasy. This has been a truism since antiquity. Meditating alone, the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius was visited by ‘fancies’. Christian hermits and medieval anchorites saw visions. The sixteenth century essayist Michel de Montaigne, sequestered in his tower room, rode the ‘wild horse’ of his imagination. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wandered alone through natural landscapes, full of ‘ecstatic reveries’. Romantic solitaries soon followed his example.

But what about now, as millions live in enforced isolation? The COVID pandemic, with its terrible toll of death and loss and longterm illness, has inflicted misery worldwide. Social distancing and lockdowns have created new levels of solitariness which many find excruciating. But this solitude has also given free rein to fantasy.

Here we are posting a series of ‘Lockdown Fantasies’ showing how pandemical solitariness plays on the imagination. This is the first. Come back for more, and dream your own. 

Barbara Taylor is Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London and Principal Investigator on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project. 

The post On Wanting to be Andrew Scott’s Mother appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

In 1824 Mary Shelley published a novel, The Last Man, that conjures up just such a trauma. In this futurist fiction a plague sweeps across continents, annihilating civilizations and causing global unrest. A novel that begins as the collective biography of a circle of friends, loosely based on Shelley’s own, gradually gives way to a tale about the inexorable power of disease, until only one individual remains – the solitary narrator, Lionel Verney.

If, as Jill Lepore has recently written, ‘the plague novel is the place where all human beings abandon all other human beings’, then The Last Man is not a conventional plague novel [2]. Inspired by the enlightened ideals of a man called Adrian (modelled on Shelley’s husband, Percy Bysshe), Verney and his friends understand the international consequences of the plague, and the need for political action.

They oppose self-serving populist policies promoted by England’s resident demagogue, a man known only as Ryland. Shelley’s characters refuse to abandon each other, intervening to assist others, and sacrificing themselves for the greater good. Together they pursue a final desperate ‘scheme of migration’ to Italy in the hope of salvaging the remnant of humanity.

But Shelley is unsparing in her depiction of the limits of individual agency and the fallacy of personal exceptionalism.

Each person ‘trusted that their beloved family would be the one preserved’, but the plague demolishes ‘that pertinacious optimism which…characterized our human nature.’

The Last Man transforms the felicity of youth and intelligence and love through a narrative which compels the reader to confront the fact that horrible things are not reserved for the poor, the immoral, or the stupid, or those who happen to be in other countries. But while The Last Man uses the plague as a catalyst for its deconstruction of society, culture, and friendship, it is not ultimately a tale of deadly infection. It is a story about an apocalypse of loneliness.

Shelley had explored loneliness before. Frankenstein’s creature is, after all, Romanticism’s avatar of ultimate alienation. The creature’s wretched fate demonstrates the monstrous deprivations of basic sociality: not to share in family is to be tormented by exclusion. But in The Last Man, the experience of familial affection only serves to amplify the pains of solitude. As it progresses, the novel accumulates scenes of death: infants, parents, wives, husbands, brothers, sisters. Its bills of mortality are unremitting; Shelley presents the reader with the impossible calculus of loss.

The novel’s account of global pandemic draws on her reading of Daniel Defoe’s The Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a work which tries to capture the impact of contagious disease by shifting between bare enumeration, anecdote, and the isolated perspective of its first-person narrator – the quasi-anonymous H.F. Yet if Journal of the Plague Year provides Shelley with an historical account of the paranoia, confusion, and horror of contagious disease, it also furnishes her with a sense of individual alienation peculiar to Defoe.

In The Last Man’s crowning catastrophe, Verney’s two remaining friends are drowned in a storm. He finds himself alive on the shore of Italy:

For an instant I compared myself to that monarch of the waste – Robinson Crusoe. We had both been thrown companionless – he on the shore of a desolate island: I on that of a desolate world.

The schemes of material accumulation and improvement that Crusoe finds diverting cannot comfort Shelley’s relic. While Defoe’s desert island is reassuringly temporary, Shelley’s castaway’s predicament is permanent.

‘Shall I wake, and speak to none, pass the interminable hours, my soul, islanded in the world, a solitary point, surrounded by vacuum?’, Verney asks.

Such vertiginous sense of isolation, both temporal and existential, fuels the terror of the final pages of The Last Man. Humanity has receded ‘like a tide…leaving [the individual] blank and bare in the midst.’ Plague is merely Shelley’s pretext for presenting the malaise of ‘utter irremediable loneliness’: a condition of pathological intensity.

The Last Man thus deconstructs the optimistic possibilities of transcendence found elsewhere in romantic writing. In her novel Mathilda, Shelley was able to imagine a ‘perfect solitude’ where generous stores of self-subsistence meant you ‘wish for no friend’ because your own thoughts were company enough. Verney, wandering disconsolately from one empty town to another, leaves in each a desperate message: ‘Friend, come! I wait for thee!’ The irony of this long novel is that it is written without hope of a readership, yet desperately seeks an audience.

This tragic predicament – on the cusp between the need to communicate and consciousness of its futility – is Beckett without the jokes. Who is Verney in this empty world? The stark conditions of a friendless futurity dramatically reframe the philosopher David Hume’s lament:

‘Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return?’ [3].

In The Last Man, loneliness is a kind of primal anguish: the reactivation of world-annihilating pain which critics have frequently connected to the traumatic death of Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, days after her birth. As Mary Jacobus has argued, Shelley’s writing is ‘suffused with maternal mourning as well as survivor guilt’ [4]. Verney’s grief – denatured and dispossessed – is that of the childless mother.

The Last Man is an astonishing work, but it does not spare its readers. Its vision of the hapless survivor living a kind of posthumous existence resonates with contemporary feelings of climate grief as well as the sense of helplessness as we confront COVID-19. Can such a book assist in this present moment?

Peter Melville has argued that Verney’s despair becomes ‘a kind of antibody that allows him to live with and confront the devastation and loneliness of his tragic fate’. By the close of the novel, Verney’s persistence makes him a monument to human endurance: ‘a figure whose psychical fortitude sustains and produces an enduring synthesis between contrary mental states—between hope and despair—which in turn embodies … the spectral image of good health’ [5].

Framing Shelley’s novel within the current COVID-19 crisis, Eileen Hunt Botting notes that ‘Verney realizes that even if he is the last man on Earth, he must live as though he is not. He must sustain humanity by acting upon his profound sense of the interconnectedness of his fate with other forms of life — human or not’ [6]. If the literature of loneliness inoculates against the risks of enforced, unwilled isolation, it does so by reminding us of what we stand to lose if we forget each other.

[1] Keith Snell, Spirits of Community: English Senses of Belonging and Loss, 1750-2000 (Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 1.

[2] Jill Lepore, ‘What our contagion fables are really about’, The New Yorker, March 30, 2020.

[3] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), London, 1987, p. 316.

[4] Mary Jacobus, First Things: Reading the Maternal Imaginary (Routledge, 1995), p. 107.

[5] Peter Melville, ‘The Problem of immunity in The Last Man’, SEL: 1500-1800, 2007, 47:4.

[6] Eileen Hunt Botting, ‘Mary Shelley Created ‘Frankenstein,’ and Then a Pandemic’, The New York Times, March 13, 2020.

Rebecca Barr (@R_A_Barr) is a lecturer in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. 

The post Pandemic and the Horrors of Solitude appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

1.

For myself, solitude has always meant time spent completely alone in whatever environment. A chance to not have to converse and interact with others, and to literally ‘just be’ with my own thoughts, with no outside influences. Personally, I’m an individual who has long since realised that I require time to be alone to maintain my mental health.

COVID has meant a loss of this solitude due to the fact that both my husband and teenage son are now present at all times, and so I’m rarely completely alone. Whilst they make few demands, and are actively engaged in activities physically apart from me, they are still constantly present within the household, and there’s little opportunity for the true solitude I need. I look forward to a time when I’m completely alone again.

I’m a 47-year-old female, who suffers from depression and anxiety.

2.

Prior to the pandemic I found solitude whilst driving, which is part of my job, averaging four hours per day in the car alone. Sometimes this alone time left me feeling lonely and lethargic. However, other times I found the alone time to be productive; just me and my thoughts often helped me to think things through and overcome challenges.

With COVID-19 and the lockdown and being a parent, most days have been spent with my daughter, which has delivered a different type of solitude. I find myself missing contact with adults and feeling lonely in that respect but at the same time having no time to myself whilst my 5-year-old daughter needs entertaining and demands attention (which has also provided some magical father and daughter time and memories). Ultimately, both prior to and during lockdown, solitude for me has two sides to it. The side I experience probably depends my personal state of mind at the time.

I’m a 32-year-old father and husband; my wife is a key worker who worked many hours of overtime, especially in the early weeks of the lockdown.

3.

Before the pandemic solitude meant hours at home working, writing. Or walking alone with people in sight. Cycling. Having lunch on my own in a cafe, or coffee, always with something to read. Train journeys, also with something to read. Solitude was a way of immersing myself entirely in the selfish experience of food, books, or phone. In the early days of the pandemic, before lockdown, this didn’t change much; I cycled rather than used buses so had a bit more solitude.

The moment that schools closed everything changed. Since then I have been in the same space as my partner and child for 24 hours a day with the exception of a few hours of exercise. Solitary walks are hard to achieve, though early mornings are possible. Solitary work has vanished because of parental responsibility – the loss of the disciplinary structure of school means for a good part of each day I feel responsible for making my young teen work.

Solitude on the street or in the park is now fraught with concerns about social distancing; it is rarely possible to just wander. I’ve reclaimed a solitary space in the early morning, with a firmly closed door.

My child also longs for solitude, which for them is mediated by technology: any interruption from a parent is irritating, and the independence of solitary travel is a kind of solitude that they have had removed. On the other hand, they are forced for the first time to do school work for hours at a time with no company, so a forced and deeply unwelcome solitude.

I experience solitude also second-hand, empathising with my mother, who is in her 90s living on her own with dementia. She was content to live alone until told that she could not go out and people could not visit. Now she is desperate for structure and company. So she has lost the experience of solitude for one of loneliness and being unmoored.

I’m a woman in my early fifties.

4.

Before COVID-19, working as a teacher in a busy school and spending the majority of my free time with my husband, travelling across the country to spend time with family and friends, I don’t feel I experienced solitude a great deal. Spending so much time with other adults and children and keeping to a busy schedule meant I longed for solitude. I looked forward to my lonely runs and nights when my husband stayed away due to work commitments.

I initially struggle with change, so I was anxious about lockdown, but I found a new fitness routine, was given new ways to work and tried to make time at home fun. Staying at home with just my husband was a relief. Not being allowed to travel or attend events, gave us time back to slow down and removed social pressures, allowing us to spend quality time together.

I now worry about life going back to some form of normality and having to share my husband and our time again.

It is in my work life where I have experienced the most solitude. I am used to spending my day with 30 children, various members of support staff and in constant contact with outside agencies and parents/careers. My school decided we would not conduct online/video lessons but set work, which would be available each day on our school website.

Asking questions and setting work to no response has been tough, as I am used to adapting second by second to what the children do and say. I have felt lonely, sat at home on my computer waiting and hoping to receive emails from my children with pictures of their work. Sadly, only a small percentage of my class have been able to be in regular contact, which also means I have worried about their physical and mental health and how they are dealing with their solitude.

I do miss my own family and friends and spending time with them, but have found I am speaking to some of them more than I ever have done before, so I do not feel as removed from them as I actually am. As restrictions begin to be lifted and friends and family are meeting for socially distanced walks, etc., I can see I am beginning to feel some solitude, as living so far from many of them means I cannot spend time with them physically at all and do not know when I will be able to.

I’m a teacher in my early thirties.

Our project is very grateful to everyone who took the time to tell us about their experiences. We are still collecting solitude testimonies for our project. If you would like to contribute, please click here to be taken to our survey. 

The post With or Without You: Solitude and Family Life appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.