When the pandemic started, I was working cash-in-hand for a few different places, casual relief work, behind the bar, washing up, whatever anyone needed. It was low-stakes and everywhere I worked was short-staffed and pleased of the help. It was nice.
What wasn’t nice was that when the pandemic hit, I was technically unemployed, so not entitled to any of the government subsidies. I also hadn’t saved any sizable sum of money that early into my sobriety, so I immediately was in a bit of financial trouble.
I say I was in financial trouble, but all that trouble consisted of was going into my overdraft. I just had to accept that I had no money saved, and no one was going to bail me out, and utilize the debt slavery option that we in the West enjoy. And that is what it is, slavery. The second my bank account went from 10 bucks to minus 10 bucks, I felt the weight of it.
Debt is a psychological tool of the state used to beat you into a state of submission and cowardice. You’re supposed to feel like a dog who ripped up a sofa once you go into it, to walk around staring at the ground, tail between your legs, back hunched over like a zombie.
Though I was sober, I was still on antidepressants, prescribed to me a couple of years prior to my sobriety. I forget which year, whichever year the last Radiohead album came out. Let me check. 2016. It was 2016 I started taking antidepressants, two years before I stopped drinking. I know this, because I really wanted to kill myself when I first saw the video for the song ‘Daydreaming’ by Radiohead.
And that was the reason I was taking them, in 2016 I had woken up one morning and immediately drank half a bottle of whiskey, and was planning to kill myself, so I phoned my liberal ex-girlfriend and told her this information in floods of tears. I had figured she might be the last person to truly love me, so she was the right person to call.
She calmly said that it was a stupid idea, and that I should at least go to the doctor and speak to someone, maybe try and take some medication. It was that suggestion by someone I thought might have loved me once, if only briefly before they got to know the real me, that stopped me from doing something pretty stupid that would have prevented me being able to sit here and type these words now.
My way of coping with the pandemic was extremely dumb. I regressed into a teenager in the most extreme way possible. I played video games all day every day and streamed them online where my friends would come and hang out in the chat.
I started collecting and restoring vintage Simpsons plush toys, rotten and tatty old Bart Simpsons, that I’d put in the washing machine and attempt to restore to their former nineties glory. I drew black irises back onto the white scuffed plastic eyes, I took before and after photos and sent them to my friends, it was honest work. I guess that’s the sort of person I was, when the world stopped, I restored plush toys.
I also started buying vintage clothing like the stuff I wore as a kid in the 90s, Carhartt jackets and beanies, baggy Dickies jeans, chunky Nike Air Max trainers, G-Shock watches, vintage South Park t-shirts.
I bought an old-fashioned CRT television and a load of 80s and 90s anime on VHS, all the ones I had as a kid: Akira, Crying Freeman, Vampire Hunter D, Dominion Tank Police, Legend of the Overfiend.
I listened to mixes of 90s music, techno, trance, and house. The soundtracks to the Wipeout video games. I emulated and streamed myself playing Super Nintendo games that I grew up loving: Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country.
I filmed myself dancing to Gabber music in my garden, head shaved to the skin, wearing a baggy tracksuit and brand-new Nike trainers. It was one of the funniest videos I have ever shot, but I kept it to myself as I felt a little like it was the most telling thing I did that confirmed I was slightly losing my mind.
If my neighbours had looked out of the window whilst I was filming it, they would have probably phoned the police for how abstract it must have appeared. They may not have even recognised me, and assumed I was a rogue Polish man dancing in peoples gardens.
(This was the main inspiration for such an act, and is one of the best videos you will ever see in your life)
I made some cool friends from other countries and we shared our hideous lockdown stories. We were all locked in our houses; it was awful and upsetting. I had no money and was going into debt. My father lost his mind.
I loved streaming and speaking to people during the streams. I had double-digit viewing figures, which was cool. People who had enjoyed the YouTube channel also searched me out and watched my livestreams.
As much as it’s nice to write about these little ways of coping I managed to figure out for myself, the whole thing sucked. We all know now that it was a tremendous psychological-operation, a total war on our freedom with far-reaching ramifications.
I certainly felt differently about the world and the government afterwards, as we all did. And I think we were supposed to. It was a assault on mankind.
Everyone coming out of their house at the same time once a week to bang their pots and pans for the health workers was the most inane and impotent display I have ever borne witness to. Slaves in love with their chains, just a total globohomo brain-attack. I hated it.
A year or so after the lockdowns, I started using an anonymous Twitter burner account to seek out what I suppose you’d call ‘dissident’ voices. A lot of people were still banned at this point, but there were new accounts to follow that made me laugh a lot, whilst also offering an alternate narrative on the state of the world.
I became familiar with Raw Egg Nationalist, Sol Brah, Bane of Mars, who all made me laugh, as well as offering the occasional gem of life advice.
It was laughing along with the memes posted by these accounts and others that actively encouraged me to start lifting heavy weights again, and also to get off of antidepressants, which at that point in my life had become about as useful as Tic-Tacs.
I didn’t want to be physically or mentally weak anymore, and I didn’t want to be reliant on antidepressants to be a functioning human being.
I didn’t tell anyone I was stopping taking antidepressants, because I knew what they would all say. So after about six years of being on them, I stopped, overnight, cold turkey. Exactly the way you’re not supposed to do it, and also exactly the way I had stopped drinking.
It was a form of self-abuse. I wanted the worst side effects possible as a punishment for taking them for so long. I wanted to hurt myself, to pay some kind of price for openly being so weak, for so long.
It was pretty gross but not nearly as bad as I thought it might have been, mostly headaches, light-headedness and ocular migraines where my eyes blurred at the sides, sort of fizzed, and I felt like I was going blind.
I didn’t even think about going back on them, or “tapering” myself off like you’re supposed to. I just stubbornly decided like I did with everything else, just flicked a switch and it became my reality, my truth.
I decided I wasn’t going to take them anymore, so I didn’t. I just decided that was the truth. I willed it into being.
Once I got big and strong again, and free of any medication and junk processed food, I felt great.
To this day, I’m still off of antidepressants, still don’t eat junk food, and still lift heavy.
I owe a lot of this to the poasters during the pandemic. I’m sure they know it, but they offered light during a very dark time, and I’ll always be thankful for that.
The pandmeic was kind of cool. Forgetting about the future was great.