You do shop work, right? It's important and I'm grateful for everyone that does it, but I also have two friends who have stopped going in. One for her physical health, and one for her mental wellbeing. There's no shame in it.
If the stress is fucking you up, and you can step away, do it. Your mum too.
Yeah, I think I'm going to stop going in for the foreseeable future. Thankfully I will very likely still have my job come May but, for the time being, I don't want to spend those shifts (few they may be) having my anxiety lifted up to near-panic levels just so I can be around disgusting cunts or rude cunts.
My Mum's a different story because she
is vital to her school in the way a regular teacher isn't so I don't know whether she'll be able to just not go in.
Frankly right now it's less the panic of it all, that's subsided thankfully (though my underlying anxiety is still going strong, but that won't be fixed without some form of therapy I think), and more the utter helplessness and lack of knowing. I don't know who in my family is going to come out of this alive and well and who is going to not come out of it at all. If I could put it into words it's just an overwhelming sense of sadness, I suppose; not one where you want to cry all the time but one where you just feel so numb and the thoughts of what might happen puts a pit in your stomach. It's the exact same feeling I had when my dog died suddenly at the age of 6; it got to the night where she passed and I wasn't panicking I was just... numb; as such it really does feel like things aren't going to end wel here.
Right now I think what I do want is just some basic, obvious statistics of how likely it is that people can die from this. But I don't know if I'd be able to trust that even if I was given them because there being a chance always means that the worst is possible.
It's very serious, but it is not the apocalypse. Civilization won't crumble, but it will certainly change. This will likely be the single biggest event you have lived through up to this point. If you're taking care of yourself and your family, and focusing on maintaining distance and cleanliness, you are doing exactly what you should be doing.
You should probably restrict your internet use if it's too overwhelming to read about. Play some games, watch some movies, read books, anything else. Relaxation time is more important than ever now for our mental health. None of us can be certain how this shakes out, but we need to adapt longterm ways to cope with what is happening to the world.
I don't think that society is going to crumble, I'm just so anxious as to whether my own world is going to crumble. If my Mum dies now when I'm so far from 'ready' for it then I don't know how the fuck I'd cope; I've yet to even get over the residual trauma from the multiple other premature deaths I've experienced throughout my family. Financially all of my family is relatively OK, and if things were to start 'crumbling' societally then we're fairly well-removed from where that would happen. However the virus does not discriminate so if/when we get it we're on the chopping block and it's really only luck that will save us at that point.
I've been trying to cope by playing video games (Animal Crossing definitely helps, and I'm going to watch a ton of the classic Disney films I've missed when Disney+ launches here) but, at the end of the day, that lingering fear and sadness is still there.
