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19th March 2020
04:10pm GMT

It's easy to discredit an internal concern as futile, to ignore anxiety for fear of offending others.
After all, who are we to complain about missing our friends, hugging our colleagues, and spending lazy spring evenings in beer gardens surrounded by people? Not when others are sick. Not when we're not.
But the reality of this new normal that we find ourselves in is that daily life has been entirely disrupted, and that it's completely OK to feel disrupted too.
Staying home all day can be tough. Being away from the physical presence of people we love can be lonely. Self isolation can be isolating. It's in the name.
The likelihood is that these feelings (like the outbreak itself) will, for a lot of us, continue into the early summer months. Already over the past week, I've been up and down far too many times for a person who's been spending her days meandering exclusively between the sitting room, the park, and SuperValu.
Simply taking it day by day sometimes doesn't seem good enough. Hour by hour is more tangible, manageable, until the day when we're finally told that we can enter crowded rooms again, stand close to our friends, hug the people we've missed.
Until then though, there is much to worry about - and much to be allowed to be worried about. But there are also some things, smaller things, that we can be grateful for too.
Like the eagerly anticipated return of the sun in the morning, good WiFi connections, and long walks in parks that haven't seen so much footfall since last summer.
There's the unwavering support of strangers on the internet, live stream gigs, and yoga classes that you probably wouldn't have bothered going to in real life anyway.
There's the knowledge that at some point, life will be back to normal - bringing with it all of the older, now duller, anxieties that came with it.Explore more on these topics:

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