Lockdown through autistic eyes
By Samuel
When I heard that lockdown was first occurring in early 2020, in late March, I was partially mortified. I knew that I was going to end up being denied my freedom and suffer additional stress from the annoying activity from some of the residents I was living with.
One resident would every day play his music loud and start singing out of tune. The constant and endless noise was unbearable and ridiculous enough for me to frustrate over.
Lockdown is, in a sense, the equivalent of prison, only you’re not sharing your cell with violent criminals that commonly threaten your body and existence with their harmful and violent capacities. I’d say it’s like serving a sentence in a prison for falsely accused cellmates who are not truly dangerous enough to belong there.
It can be frustrating for me, sometimes, especially without coping techniques that I hadn’t yet developed at the beginning of this lockdown era. It can be even more frustrating and unbearable for people with less capacity and understanding than I have.
Some people have kicked off because of this, I’d imagine.
On the other hand, the staff, the support workers and everyone else who supports people like us have made it well-understood that if they let us out, worse things would happen to us. Fatal severity, I mean. And by that, I’m referring directly to death. It was either death or a difficult journey back to normal.
Sometimes you do get very difficult and frustrating choices to make and often the best one still causes problems, whereas the other one leads to a worse path, one which even has the possibility of traumatising you.
I often look at myself with thoughts about making hard and emotionally painful choices. I tell myself, “You need to decide which choice feels like the worst one out of the two, and choose the other one, regardless of the consequences. Choose the lesser of the two severe examples.”
In a case like this one, you need to suffer lesser negatives to stay alive. Do what you need to do to survive.
The coronavirus disaster has clearly killed more than a million people, and England was probably said to have suffered the worst level of it. That’s what I perceived from what people were saying at the time.
During the opening stages of November in 2020, I was made aware that the disease was approaching Kent and that we’d be forced to reinstitute the inevitable possibility of lockdown. Another lockdown was ordered by Boris Johnson.
When the announcement was made on TV, I confess I wasn’t that upset, as long as we had a deadline for its final stages. And once those final stages were reached and breached, the lockdown would be removed. The date for that was said to be 2 December.
There’s always light at the end of the tunnel, as some people occasionally say. Light often represents hope, whereas darkness represents the opposite: despair and hopelessness.
