earlier whilst walking about through the streets with the lights and the dark i was thinking, well this version of the world we fell into is pretty fucked up, isn't it? specifically the part where a pandemic started and then after a while people pretended it was over but a lot of us know it isn't.

the part with an ongoing threat from a dangerous virus which disables and kills people and which continues to spread mostly unchecked, whilst being told it's over and fine and no longer a problem – by organisations as well as the people around us.

i don't feel i'm able to really talk about it anywhere, including with people i know, even those people who do recognise that the pandemic is still ongoing. there's a feeling like if i were truly honest it would be somehow monstrous and wrong. so i don't speak, or i do in little pieces here and there but it's never enough or all of it.

once i said something to my therapist about people being vectors for covid. because that's what it feels like. what people are are beings who can give me covid.

i didn't mean to be this scared. it feels somehow like my fault, and that's hardly helped by the current situation, in which i, avoiding things which might mean i get covid, am the problem. there is something wrong with me for not moving on.

i never meant to be this scared, i didn't react the way i did on purpose. and i might be elsewhere now (definitely still masking and taking covid seriously but possibly less stuck and more able to take some of the risks i need to take or might want to to get to do things that are important to me) had the world not just decided it was over. i've been thinking for a while now about how emotional safety and closeness allow for risk taking – maybe if i felt less unseen and unheard and isolated and left behind i might be more able to do things.

when i walk around and see people in the world that i now no longer belong to, it's strange. i miss the world and being able to do things. this city used to be one i felt more part of but now the city is there and i am often sort of alongside it somehow instead.