Restoring my soul.

My last blog post was in September of 2019 – It is now April 2021 and here I am, again, turning my hand to the literary world of blogging.

January of 2020 we celebrated my daughter’s 18th birthday with a huge family party. My eldest son went to Japan for the month of February and just made it home in time before the Covid 19 Pandemic shut the world down. He had started a new job before leaving for Japan and the Company immediately shut down its retail arm, however his job was safe and he “worked” from home for the whole year.

As a retail worker myself I was classed as “essential”, I work in a liquor store. Which perplexed me at the time; I mean how is liquor considered “essential”. I was soon to learn how quickly we humans need a crutch in times of crisis. Business boomed, sales quadrupled in a matter of months. Everyone became a Sommelier or a Cocktail King or Queen in their own lounge rooms. Delivery systems went into overdrive with online orders growing exponentially with each passing day of the crisis. Even during the long lockdown people were using their daily “shopping trip” to buy liquor. It would seem that if everyone was relying so heavily on alcohol to get them through, that they would be happy when they came into store. Not even close. Our team was constantly being abused by customers, screamed at, called names, spat on, physically assaulted and basically blamed for everything that was wrong in the world.

Those of us still working in public lived in fear of contracting the disease every day. PPE and hand sanitiser our only defense against this deadly virus. In the beginning the media applauded all the “essential” workers, then as the weeks and months moved on it became normal for us to be out in public and the media decided that we were no longer worthy of praise and thanks and they and the greater public turned their backs. Gone were the nightly interviews with nurses, with Woolworths workers, with cleaners, with just about anyone that was working, not tucked away safely in their homes, protected, cared for, respected. The focus turned to those who were working from home, their mental health, their difficulties in organising children who were learning from home, the struggles of being 24\7 with their partners.

Essential external workers were forgotten, they were even forgotten by their companies head offices. All services went to those staff working from home. Delayed for those working on the floor, in the Public sphere. It was forgotten that the retail worker on the floor, the nurse, the doctor, the cleaner etc… have families at home. They had to organise children learning from home, navigate their partners schedules so they could fit caring for the kids in with their working roster. They still had to do everything that they always did, in most cases without respite. No access to carers or babysitters to fill the gaps. Some essential workers chose to stay away from their families out of fear of passing the disease on. Where was the compassion shown for these people?

Everyone wants to whinge and whine about how hard 2020 was for them and only them. We all have those people in our lives who need to one up everyone. Covid turned us all into that type of person. Conversations everywhere with “well you think you had it hard… let me tell you….” and they are off, expanding and building on an imagined slight, a “hardship” that was unfair in only that “how dare it happen to them” way reserved for the entitled few.

Now here in 2021 and things are almost normal again, the only restriction in our lives is overseas travel. To hear people complain about that, one would be forgiven for believing that OS travel is something they do every week. People I know have never been outside their town are screaming hard done by because they can’t travel to Bali or Europe ‘because of bloody Covid’. To these people I ask…”Why? Why would you want to travel overseas to countries that are burying thousands of people a day due to Covid deaths? Why are you craving lockdown for 2 weeks at either end of your travels? There is no freedom to be gained in travelling outside our borders. Stay home, see your State or even your city. Learn to be content with the freedom we still have, but won’t have if we open our world up too soon. Do you really want a return to 2020?