Depression of an over-thinker

I didn’t clean the bookshelves. I just had a bad day. I can’t guarantee it’s over and had promised myself a day without any screen time to compensate but daily blog-writing is part of my routine, so I would like to apologise now.

I’m just fed up with it all.

Nobody listens to me.

No matter how much I shout at the telly or Twitter, they just don’t listen. It’s so depressing.
You see, I think a lot. Too much. I want to be happy and cheerful and believe the spin but I just can’t stop thinking about it all and so it gets very difficult.

It’s a shame because I was doing so well. I was quite enjoying the smaller life, my little routines and just one big thing to think about.

Ok. I’m sure you don’t want to hear them either but here are some of the things my over-thinking brain is stressed and depressed about. I’m going to number them. Lists are brilliant for dealing with stress. Once again, I apologise but you can just skip to the end.

1. Care homes - I’ve never worried more about getting old more than I do at the moment. All this talk of care homes freaks me out. Who wants to live in a care home? I know that no one wants their parents to die but if I was 100 years old, sitting in an overly hot room that smells of death and bodily fluids,  could I be certain I wouldn’t be grateful for a quick death from a respiratory illness?
Also, why don’t private care homes have PPE? Why do the government have to provide it, when they are private business? They take so much money and pay their staff (who are usually brilliant in difficult circumstances) minimum wage.

2. Airlines - Some are bullies. Richard Branson is a master manipulator. He didn’t get and stay rich by not knowing which strings to pull.

3. Aeroplanes - You can’t avoid coming into contact with every bug transmitted on the breath carried by every passenger when you are on an aeroplane because the air is circulated. People who travel on them and then take videos of how busy they are and send them to the news complaining that they are not practising social distancing are idiots. If they are frightened of catching the virus then they should  not travel by air.

4. Complaining about people - It is a slippery slope from wondering why someone doesn’t appear to be following the ‘rules’ to reporting them. It worries me that we will come out of this with a licence to busybody.

5. Face masks - I’m very worried about face masks. I can’t wear them. They make claustrophobia worse. Also, the evidence is that they won’t protect you. Some studies say that cloth masks, once they are damp (30 minutes of breathing) make you more susceptible to catching respiratory viruses. They also change behaviour and make people think they are invincible. People wearing face masks are already a nightmare in supermarkets, leaning over you, pulling them down to speak etc. If they were so effective then why are so many doctors and nurses, treating patients, still catching Coronavirus?
The proper disposable masks that they ask you to wear at hospital are always too big and I worry what will happen when I’m bumping into things because I can’t see.

6. Speculation about the end of lockdown - The government is playing a very tricky game. They have a plan without a time scale for the plan but they are waiting until Sunday to tell us. In a news vacuum.   that can only lead to speculation. I worry that they don’t have a plan and are waiting for newspapers to write bits of leaked suggestions to see how we all react. I worry that no one really knows what to do and they are leaving it to us and we’ve been listening to Bob274 on Twitter.

7. Morality - Why can the Prime Minister get a young woman who worked for him pregnant, while still married to a woman undergoing cancer treatment and everyone thinks it’s brilliant and marvellous, cooing over little Willy Johnson but Professor Lockdown can have a married woman come over to his flat for a bit of consensual nookie and he has to resign? I know that they are saying that the professor didn’t follow his own rules on social distancing but as he explained, he is immune because he has had the virus. Is this more about morality? If so, haven’t we got confused?

8. The science - There isn’t such a thing as THE science. When the government are saying, “We are being led by the science,” they are passing the buck. Those scientists in SAGE should be very afraid. When people look back to what went wrong (and they will because that’s how history works) those scientists are going to be blamed. Science is never unbiased. A scientist has an idea and then it is tested. The idea is biased. The testing should make it less so.

9. Sexual assault - hiding your willy in a Pringles tube so that someone touches it when they are hoping for a potato based snack is sexual assault. Ollie Murs is going crazy in lockdown and his girlfriend might be happy to play this game but really?

10. Why - I have a big question that I can’t seem to find the answer to and it is bothering my brain more than anything.
It’s about SARS and MERS. So, if Coronavirus is behaving like those viruses and not influenza b why aren’t we looking at what happened to them? Neither of those viruses is a problem. No vaccine, or treatment was developed and they both died out? Why? I don’t understand. The world didn’t need to be locked down. It just went away. The countries that experienced these illnesses have a lower death rate. Did experiencing SARS provide some sort of immunity? All viruses mutate, which is why we don’t develop lifelong immunity. The common cold mutates quickly, so we are susceptible to it two or three times a year. No one knows how quickly Covid-19 will mutate. But what if, the fact that it is not a human virus (just like SARS and MERS) when it mutates it can’t do it effectively because of the RNA strands being different? What if it mutates to a less effective form and dies out?
I know that’s a good thought; a positive thought but all this thinking hurts.

Now that I’ve written my list I’m hoping for a better day. My family are hoping for a better day because, quite frankly, I was foul yesterday.