What a year the last month has been. Try as I might, I’ve struggled to write this piece; to make sense of the world we find ourselves living in. Not least because it’s really difficult to report for a monthly magazine on a situation that changes hour by hour. Each draft looks completely different from the one before it; my heart breaking all over again as I read notes I made just a few weeks ago, still a faint optimism there that this storm might have passed by now.
It feels as though there’s a tidal wave coming, and we’re standing on the shore, powerless and paralysed. It’s too surreal for words, watching as it swells and swells, our deepest fears come to life yet somehow worse than we could ever have imagined. The size and scale of the wave is overwhelming, the devastation it will wreak too much to bear. What will be left when it hits? What will it leave it its wake? I want to do something to help, but I’m not a doctor or a nurse or a key worker. I’m just a writer, and what use are words when the wave comes? I can’t build a boat, or teach people to swim. Instead, I wake in the night, drowning in my own anxiety, all the while knowing the wave hasn’t reached land yet. I think of my loved ones, scattered across the world, no idea when I might see them again. Certainly not for some time. I wish I’d held them longer, closer, tighter when I could.
COLLECTIVE VULNERABILITY