This morning, instead of going to church, I put this note through all the houses on our street.
Despite being an extrovert, I have a tendency toward social anxiety. Despite being an evangelist, I really hate door knocking. As I approached each door, I noticed lots of “no junk mail” stickers and felt briefly worried. One sticker said “no unaddressed mail”. Putting notes through the doors of people I’d never met - even though we live within a few dozen metres of each other - felt risky.
Even worse - some people were outside their houses. I actually had to talk to them! “Don’t worry, I won’t come too close,” was my opening gambit. As someone who suffered from OCD as a young adult, fear of contaminating others is quite a familiar sensation. We Brits have the reputation of being standoffish and maybe a bit antisocial, and the virus is not helping in this regard. And yet, I live in the commuter belt; many of us on our street go off to London on trains every morning and come home late in the evening. The Coronavirus is making our worlds much smaller, keeping us in very small communities. My world has shrunk to the street I live on and the Tesco Metro round the corner.
Before I got home from delivering the leaflets, I already had two WhatsApp messages from people on my street. Hopefully more will arrive over the next few hours. One of the couples who got in touch lives just seven houses along from us, but I didn’t even know their names.
This week I’ve been feeling paralysed with shock. Every day the news has got worse and worse, with the situation changing every 12 hours. Last Sunday I was on a train from Cumbria to London. Today, Mother’s Day, I won’t even visit my Mum, who lives 15 miles away. Part of my mind has been mulling over ways of doing creative community engagement (which is kind of my job. I am an evangelist, after all). The other part of my mind has been craving quiet and rest, just wanting to curl up in a ball on the sofa. The broader context for us is that we’ve been getting ready to adopt two children, which to be honest was already making my baseline stress level pretty high. Trying to declutter, rearrange furniture, figure out what we needed to buy and what we could borrow, how we were going to get the fence fixed because the social worker thought it was a hazard. Oh, and an attempted break-in a couple of weeks ago. Now it feels like the whole world is on high alert. I’m used to a level of anxiety in the back of my mind - now the whole world is like the inside of my head.
And yet we are of course the lucky ones. We have enough money to buy food (and there is food in the shops - just no bread or potatoes!). We can both work from home, so we probably won’t lose our jobs. Neither of us is ill yet, and although my husband has asthma, it’s very well controlled. I can’t begin to imagine the stress of people who have already lost their jobs, or who were already relying on benefits, or who are vulnerable and struggling to get their basic needs met. Or frontline NHS staff, whose job it is to get close to people with this life-threatening contagious illness and try to make them well, while literally risking their own lives.
So, the note is a small act of resistance against the encroaching fear. And so far people are responding really positively. Thanks to the Methodist Church website and Peter Dominey from Church From Scratch for suggesting the idea.
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