Body —
an excerpt from an essay collection about women’s experiences during the pandemic.

Published by Hachette Australia.

The beginning of lockdown resembled a sort of apocalyptic retreat. After the fridge was stocked with fresh food and the cupboards filled with cans, I fled the safety of my home, once more, for Aesop. I returned with an $83 serum that defied all rationality but delivered a purpose. I would end March of 2020, with a clean face and a sense of order. There were no dinners to attend or plans to cancel. The world had cancelled everything and I was quietly thrilled. I’d been granted the one thing I had always wanted more of - time - and revelled in the question of what to do with it. I would develop a significant yoga habit and meditate twice daily. I would organise my emails and declutter my apartment. It would be a process of reduction, not accumulation, and I wasn’t just talking about furniture here. I wasn’t going to live the busy, frantic life I’d been living; one with contending priorities and an overwhelming to-do list. I was going to live slower, simpler, and reemerge from this pandemic as her. The woman who did yoga every morning and owned an inbox that frequently returned to zero - and always fit into her jeans.

When I was having these thoughts, I lived in a one-bedroom apartment that overlooked an empty beach on the Eastern shore of Sydney. It was so strange seeing the normally busy-to-bursting blanket of sand devoid of people. My boyfriend joked that we lived above a national park. The long stretch of white sand reflected the expansiveness of my mood and the possibility of fresh starts. I was a 28-year-old writer who had just taken the plunge - the risk - to go freelance. My first book was being released later in the year. As the world was shutting down, I was starting a new chapter. I had the privilege of good health, no dependents, and a safe home to retreat to. Although, if I’m honest with you, I wasn’t without fear. I didn’t have the economic security of a full-time job during the biggest global health crisis of my lifetime. The timing of my decision to go freelance was completely laughable, because if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. So I silenced that fear often and focussed on the silver linings. I had book edits and an empty calendar, which felt like something closer to a gift. I was stuck in a tiny, one bedroom apartment, and for the first time in a long time, I felt like I had space. 

I know I wasn’t alone here. 

The pandemic has embodied countless paradoxes - the enemy is invisible, the greatest way to help is by doing nothing at all - and this was just another. Government-mandated time inside had gifted me the reflective pause I needed. My own desires to become a better version of myself were cast against a backdrop of mass human suffering. The novel slowness of my days were juxtaposed with images of mass graves at Hart Island and Italian military vehicles transporting bodies. I carried grief for those suffering and hope for individual self-improvement, while simultaneously punishing myself for what felt like shameful introspection. I doused my face with expensive serum before bed, only to lay there, awake. 

The philosopher Alain de Botton once said that humans are ordering animals. Everything we contribute to, be it literature, science or politics is an attempt to create a sense of order in the chaos. I guess that is what was happening here. As a global health crisis wreaked havoc across the world, I tried to create a long stretch of white sand in my mind. A private beach filled with fitness routines and cleared inboxes and well-fitted jeans and control. It was a delusional, selfish act but it was also an attempt to create a sense of order in the chaos. I couldn’t control the growing death toll that I checked a stupid amount of times each night, but I could control my little world. Other people controlled their worlds too. They enthusiastically embraced sourdough starters and ticked off long-neglected jobs around the house. They put puzzles back together and planted new gardens and embraced virtual workouts like it was their sole purpose in life.

We weren’t frontline workers bearing the emotional and physical cost of this pandemic, but citizens following stay-at-home orders. The solitude we were asked to embrace soon became a condition many of us wanted to live with in a more ongoing way. The pause reprogrammed us. When everything was cancelled, when our days were stripped of the superfluous, our priorities rearranged themselves and suddenly became clear. The composer and music producer Quincy Jones once said that all you need in this life is love to share, health to spare, and friends who care. Our post-pandemic priorities feel a little like a Quincy Jones quote. People are moving out of big cities to find more space and slow down. Others are hiking more and joining open swimming groups. Some have grown to enjoy their reduced work hours and are spending more time with their families. And many of us are socialising less than we were before the pandemic started, but are more present for the conversations in front of us.

The pandemic has forced people to endure horrible lockdowns, caused healthcare workers to suffer from overwork and burnout, left those on the frontline working with never-ending fear, and caused immense guilt and grief to flow through individuals and families and towns and cities and countries all over the world. Yet this difficult time has also forced people to think differently and question themselves. Whether they are an essential worker or a knowledge worker. Whether they have remained healthy or fallen ill. Whether they have spent this global health crisis grappling with isolation and loneliness or immense stress and too many people in their house. This pandemic has been a time of mass human suffering, but it has also given way to something that feels like a new way of living. The question, now, becomes whether it can maintain its hold.

~ ~ ~

In the Infectious Disease Unit of the Royal Adelaide Hospital, Anna Liptak, 47, was lying in a cream room with dark thoughts. She had just been diagnosed with severe Covid, which is something around twenty percent of Covid-19 patients endure. Anna had spent the past week struggling to breathe. Just one day before, she’d been at home with what she thought was sinusitis. Now doctors and nurses would spend thirty minutes putting on protective clothing before they could even be in the same room as her. Usually, Anna lives her life outdoors. She’s a personal trainer, who helps hundreds of her clients get fitter and healthier. It made no sense to her why she would be one of the first people in South Australia to be diagnosed with Covid-19. Anna had run 27 marathons. She was fit, healthy and middle-aged. She wasn’t immunocompromised. But as she lay there, alone, all Anna could think about were the people she had compromised.

One week earlier, Anna had attended a conference, where she and a colleague had been trying to sell a fitness documentary. She returned home with a headache and, the next day, collapsed on the laundry floor. Her GP diagnosed her with the abovementioned sinusitis, but there was something in the back of her mind telling her it was more. She was bedridden, struggling to breathe, occasionally attempting to return to regularity. There had been one comparatively good day, when Anna had felt a little better and deluded herself into running one of her scheduled fitness classes. Now she’d do anything to take it back. One of Anna’s fitness class clients had a husband with lung cancer. If he contracted the virus because of Anna, he might die. If that happened then she would never forgive herself. Anna turned on the TV from her hospital bed and reeled at the images on the news from overseas. Italy, America, Spain. Mothers, daughters, fathers, sons. There was a woman in the US who had passed the virus onto her mother and her mother had died. Anna had seen her mother just recently. What if she died? Or her father? What if her husband had Covid? Or her teenage children? 

The phone rang. Anna’s 17-year-old son, Zac, had Covid-19. Anna spent the next three days worrying about everyone but herself. Meanwhile, her husband was riddled with anxiety and dressed in PPE scrubbing their family home from top to bottom. The couple’s younger son, Lachy, 15, was isolated in one room, while Zac was isolated in another. Anna controlled what she could through her phone. Zac’s condition wasn’t critical so Anna had pleaded with doctors to let him isolate at home. “He wouldn’t be able to cope in here”, she told them. Researchers in China have found that 96.2 percent of clinically stable Covid-19 patients suffered from significant post-traumatic stress symptoms prior to discharge. These symptoms, the researchers said, can potentially lead to negative long-term outcomes such as “lower quality of life and impaired working performance”. As Anna lay in her slim single bed, alone in hospital, she wondered how her family would fare. 

After one week in the Infectious Disease Unit, Anna went home. Her health had improved and she had convinced the doctors to allow her to isolate in her own bed. Her husband and youngest son moved to the family’s holiday house, about an hour’s drive away. She and Zac would stay isolated. An ambulance chaperoned her home. The sun was out and Anna lay by the pool with Zac. They couldn’t physically do much but, guiltily, Anna didn’t want this quiet, private time to end. They ordered UberEats. They chatted. They lay in silence, with their eyes closed, basking in the sun like lizards. Life had been busy with two young kids and two businesses. In this strange stretch of suspended time, Anna could breathe and take it all in. 

Cleaning the house gave Anna a sense of purpose. She had never been obsessed with cleanliness, but after being in hospital, she “became OCD very quickly”. As one of the early Covid-19 patients, Anna had felt “diseased” and became fixated on staying clean. Psychologists believe obsessive-compulsive disorder, which is a manifestation of anxiety, could be one of the most prominent longer-term mental health issues outlasting the pandemic. Author of The Psychology of Pandemics, and a professor in psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, Steven Taylor, believes the stress of the coronavirus is likely to trigger or worsen OCD in people who have a genetic predisposition toward forms of it, such as cleaning compulsions or contamination obsessions. Taylor told the BBC that, unless people receive proper mental health treatment, they will become “chronic germaphobes”.

Nurses checked in on Anna and Zac every day. Her friends visited the family home and laid out a picnic on the front lawn. Zac and Anna sat inside, separated by a window. Someone pulled out an acoustic guitar, and they all sang. Two weeks of horror were followed by overwhelming kindness and generosity. The all-clear came ten days after her discharge from hospital and by that time Anna didn’t want to leave the warm glow of her house. Adelaide is a small place and the family’s story had been in the newspaper. Her friends may have sung to her but Anna had also received messages of abuse from strangers who blamed her for her own illness. Down the track, her son Zac would be teased for having contracted the hugely contagious virus when he returned to school. The pandemic brought out the best and the worst in people. Anna thought their world was the only one that stopped, but when she and Zac walked into the local shopping centre on their first excursion out of the house, it appeared that everyone else had, too. There were only a few stores open, so they walked into one. The shop assistant greeted them with a friendly hello and a fresh dose of gossip. ‘Oh my god,’ she said. ‘Have you heard about the mother and son who have Corona?’ Zac looked at Anna, mortified.

Anna and Zac returned to the car, then home, packed their bags, and drove an hour south to see the rest of their family. The four of them went for a surf and for a moment, life felt good again. Almost normal. Anna reflects that since then her priorities have been rearranged. What emerged was a new way of living: one that prioritised her family and her health over work and other people’s opinions. Privately vowing to slow down the pace of life and appreciate the small joys, Anna held onto her husband’s hand while he looked at the water. He held it right back, nice and tight. When he did let go, he bent down and unconsciously washed the hand that had touched Anna’s carefully in the ocean. It hurt, but Anna understood.

~ ~ ~

Women have been disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus. They have been far more likely to lose their jobs during the pandemic than men, and far more likely to carry the burden of caregiving responsibilities and unpaid work. This has clearly widened the economic gaps between women and men but it has also revealed a crisis in women’s mental health. In September, the non-profit international aid organisation CARE released a study of 10,400 people from 38 countries which revealed women are almost three times more likely to suffer from significant mental health issues than men. Nearly a third of women reported an increase in mental health challenges, compared to 10 percent of men. In Australia, the annual Jean Hailes Women’s Health Survey  revealed that one in three women are experiencing anxiety and one in four depression. This was highest in women aged between 18 and 25, with half feeling anxious and two fifths depressed. Looking at the direct impact of the pandemic, more than 33 percent of women reported that their overall health was worse.

Suffering like this is impervious to privilege. In a book of essays released during lockdown, Zadie Smith wrote that suffering is truly universal. “Language, logic, argument, rationale and relative perspective itself are no match for it,” she wrote. “Suffering applies itself directly to its subject and will not be shamed out of itself or eradicated by righteous argument, no matter how objectively correct that argument may be.” If it could, she wrote, the CEO’s daughter wouldn’t starve herself and the famous actor wouldn’t take his own life. If it could, our suffering during the pandemic would be entirely alleviated by the knowledge that someone else’s suffering was worse. 

There have been radical differences in our pandemic experiences, but also an underlying sameness. We have been collectively isolated with the choices we made before the coronavirus arrived, and left to grapple with them while it persisted. The single woman sitting alone in her apartment doesn’t think anyone will ever know such loneliness. The mother trying to work while homeschooling three children is lonely without ever getting a moment alone. The junior doctor dresses in PPE each morning, and spends each night alone with her trauma, unable to alleviate it with a beer at the pub with her colleagues. The manager of the aged care home and her residents band together as they grapple with an outbreak. We’ve all suffered, to varying degrees, in turns comforted and horrified by the commonality of the experience. It’s never a good idea to engage in competitive grief, but it’s also worth considering who fared worse than others during this unprecedented global crisis, if we are to have any hope of coming out of it better than we came in. 

~ ~ ~ 

Emma Fulu was crying in her car by lunchtime on the first day of formal homeschooling. She had escaped from her three daughters in order to have a breakdown in peace. She sat in the front seat, hands on the steering wheel and head in those hands, and howled. Life suddenly felt impossible. Her eldest daughter was nine-years-old, the twins were six, and they wanted attention at the same time, all the time. How was Emma supposed to tend to each child’s individual education, while also working? Impossible. Emma is the founder of The Equality Institute, a global feminist agency working to advance gender equality and end violence against women and girls. She started the company in Melbourne after a decade working for the United Nations. When I spoke to Emma over the phone in November, 2020, she had done a pilates class and was in that delightful stage of post-exercise recovery where you need to be airlifted out of bed. It was the first class she’d done for eight months, which is a pretty good indication of both how thoroughly locked down Melbourne had been and how much time Emma had to look after herself recently. 

Emma eloquently describes 2020 as “a fucking nightmare”. She is a single parent and, when lockdown began, Emma believes she was both better and worse off - in different ways. She would have her daughters for one week, then her ex-husband would take them for the next, and back again. In the early days of the pandemic Emma was enthusiastic. School holidays had been extended and she was getting creative with the kids, while there were no formal lessons to worry about. They were making earrings and baking cupcakes together. Her focus was on keeping the three little people in her home entertained. Then school holidays ended and the homeschooling began. After her breakdown in the car,  Emma began caring less and less about the school work getting done. Hers became a mission of survival. While Emma was on Zoom calls with clients in other countries, her girls would build Lego or watch TV. They would play quietly together and then play-fight and then actually fight, while Emma kept her business ticking over and tended to the emotional needs of staff. The days began to blend into one another, and the nights were stolen by exhaustion. After a month of this awful cycle, Emma began to feel depressed.  

According to KFF, an American non-profit that specialises in public health research, the pandemic has exposed the deteriorating mental health of mothers who have been dealing with school closures, home school and a lack of childcare. Women with children are more likely to report symptoms of anxiety or depression than men with children; 49 percent compared to 40 percent. Emma had experienced one breakdown in her life prior to this and all the same signs began to emerge. She had regular nightmares. She broke out in acne. She was extremely emotional. She felt helpless. She visited her doctor for a mental health check and was diagnosed with burnout and situational depression. Single parents were allowed to put their children into childcare if they needed, so eventually Emma did. This reprieve lasted two weeks before the next school holidays began and lockdown ended. 

And then? Melbourne’s second wave arrived.

When stage four restrictions were enacted across the state, Emma was no longer allowed to put her daughters into childcare. “It nearly destroyed me,” she said. “That’s the thing with lockdown. These are not solvable problems. People were like, ‘What do you need?’ And I’m like, ‘Well I need help but I can’t get it.’ So at that time, there was no actual solution. I think that’s what was sometimes so overwhelming. You feel trapped because you’re like ‘I know this is not working and I know what would help, but there’s no way to get that help.’ And that’s when you feel helpless.” Helplessness, like loneliness, became a familiar feeling during lockdowns around the world. You know how to help yourself, but you can’t, and it’s the knowing that leads to frustration and apathy. Our efforts to protect people from the physical effects of the virus by instigating things like quarantine created a secondary crisis of mental ill health. 

The term ‘quarantine’ was first used in Venice, Italy in 1127 with regards to leprosy. In the mid-1300s, it was widely used in response to The Black Death, a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe and Asia. A review of literature around quarantine shows that mental health continues to worsen as the duration of quarantine extends. When the second wave of the virus hit Melbourne, residents were forced into a lockdown that lasted  111 days. When the hotel-quarantine program ended up causing more deaths, restrictions tightened even further. The state was moved into one of the strictest lockdowns in the world. It was meant to only last through August but was extended into September 2020. There were strict stay-at-home orders, requiring residents to remain within five kilometres of their homes. Most businesses were closed and there was a nightly curfew. As The New Yorker wrote in January, “For most people around the world, the stringency of the rules was hard to imagine.” 

The negative psychological effects of quarantine include anger, confusion, and post-traumatic stress symptoms. Spending more time in quarantine is a significant stressor, and some researchers have suggested there are long-lasting effects. After Stage four restrictions were announced, Lifeline saw a 30 percent increase in calls from Victorians. A week into life under the restrictions, the Victorian Government revealed there had been a 33 percent increase in young people presenting to emergency departments due to self-harm, compared to the same week in 2019. Multiple studies conducted in Europe and China during the pandemic have linked post-traumatic stress symptoms with quarantines and lockdowns. A cross-sectional online survey conducted in Italy revealed that more than 29 percent of respondents reported post traumatic stress symptoms. And another cross-sectional survey of more than 3,400 people in Spain found that 18.6 percent of respondents reported depressive symptoms, 21.6 percent reported anxiety symptoms and 15.8 reported PTSD symptoms. Loneliness was the strongest predictor of depression, anxiety and PTSD.

A study of home-quarantined young people in China during the first month of the coronavirus outbreak revealed that 12.8 percent of all participants had symptoms consistent with PTSD. A longitudinal survey of almost 2000 people across 190 Chinese cities at the beginning of the outbreak, and again four weeks later, found that the majority of respondents were experiencing moderate to severe stress, anxiety and depression. While research around the long-term mental health impacts of Melbourne’s severe lockdown is still emerging, the Victorian healthcare system is continuing to deal with an onslaught of patients presenting with mental health problems - and this hasn’t stopped since the state opened back up. Melbourne’s gruelling lockdown, experts have argued, was a case of collective trauma. A ‘collective trauma’ is a traumatic event that is shared by a group of people. Well-known collective traumas include the Holocaust, American slavery, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, and September 11; but a collective trauma can also include events such as a plane crash, war, famine, mass shootings, natural disasters or a pandemic. Collective trauma events can have direct and indirect impacts. In the case of this pandemic, the ramifications include health, employment and education, but also our relationships, our view of the world, and our sense of self. The lasting mental health impacts of a collective trauma vary from person to person, depending on their stress at the time, prior trauma history, and whether their relationships are meaningful. It can hinder someone’s ability to cope with stress, see meaning in their life, or enjoy simple pleasures. It can also lead to post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. 

Burnout is rife in the social justice space, so Emma has always had strict ways of buffering stress. She meditates and journals and does yoga. She limits social media and avoids email at night. “You go through life challenges and when the same sorts of things come up, hopefully you deal with it better than you did the first time,” she told me. “I think what gets easier is that I recognize the signs earlier, and I am much better at dealing with it. I can see the things I need to do. I know what works for me.” Given that forecasters are now gently warning that this may not be the only global pandemic we contend with in the years to come, we can all only hope we hold onto these sorts of self-care measures for next time.