Dear 2020,
Earlier this year I got myself a paper diary. I wanted to go back to writing things down, rather than having everything on my phone. I found it today and got so sad when I saw how empty it was. Just months of nothing. No people, no meetings, no life. I sat and looked at it and got a little weepy. There was supposed to be all this other stuff, and it just wasn’t there. There was only emptiness.
As always, in January, I started the year with great intentions and felt good about what was heading my way. I wanted a better balance of deadlines and parenting. We’d just returned from Christmas in Ireland and, while the rest of the world dieted, I continued to eat like my life depended on it until my forty-first birthday on 23 January (feel free to write that down). It’s always my most greedy month, because as soon as New Year is done, I get into birthday mode. I celebrate a lot every year. Multiple dinners and events, I’ve always been the same. Delighted to reach another age, excited to be healthy and (generally) happy. My birthday passed and I remained committed to making small improvements to my life – none of which involved more exercise, less food or smaller measures of tequila, but I had deleted Instagram from my phone (lasted a week). I’d started to search for a therapist to iron out the many creases that form by the time you hit your forties.
All in all, I was ready to continue to ride through this decade with a margarita in one hand and novels spouting from the fingers of the other. As Chris and I rose from the swamp of having babies we wanted to party more, dance more, write more and fuck more. Everything was on track for life to become really fun. I’d waft drunkenly through my forties, hosting parties in our garden, wearing vibrant kaftans, living off tequila and weed gummies. That was how it was going to be. Until that one Saturday morning when I woke up and everything went dark.
My friend Caroline Flack took her own life on 15 February. She was my funniest friend. It broke me. I remain unfixed. One of the worst things I could imagine happening had happened. All plans stopped. My forties were off.
This isn’t a book about Caroline, what happened to her or why. But to understand my emotional experiences of lockdown, you need to know how it began. I was grieving, and in a pretty terrible way. I quit Twitter. I refused to read the tabloids, or even listen to negativity. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to isolate (careful what you wish for). I wanted my life to be smaller (not that small, thanks Covid-19). Something seismic had happened to me and a lot of the people I love. The world could never be the same again, and then suddenly, it wasn’t. During that weird space of time between losing Caroline and isolation kicking in, I felt like I was in a world full of people who would never understand me again. Most of my friends were in London, my husband, Chris, and I were in LA in our own sad and cloudy bubble. I felt a million miles from home, but was also terrified of returning to London for the emotional memories it would throw at me. Caroline is embedded into those streets, how could I ever walk down them without screaming?
As the world started to change it felt like it was all connected. When I flew back to Los Angeles from London after the funeral the borders were literally closing behind me. I was surrounded by people in masks. The air was full of anxiety, like a huge volcano had erupted and the lava was heading towards us, no one having any idea when it would stop. For the first few days after I got home, I found it a struggle to get through reading a story to my kids. A week later, my cat pissed all over the sofa and I couldn’t smell it. Food didn’t taste of anything. I put the rough throat down to having cried my way through the previous week, but as I waved coffee under my nose and got nothing, the news broke that losing your sense of smell was a symptom. Other friends that I had been with in London started to get ill. For them it was fever, flu, days and days in bed. By all accounts, I was lucky. We all wondered if it was coronavirus itself but didn’t really believe it. Still sort of joking about it, questioning all the ridiculous hype. We had no way to find out. There were no tests at that point. Only the realisation that the global pandemic was striking us all, and the people in charge hadn’t done anything to protect us. Oh God, I thought to myself as the schools closed and the restaurants locked their doors, we’re all totally fucked.
What you are about to read are highlights from the (almost) daily diary I wrote from the start of isolation until the summer of 2020 when we moved house. I went from being a working mother with high demands and deadlines to suddenly being a full-time stay-at-home mum. I tackled this with varying levels of success. I had to step up my mum game, protect my kids from my grief, be emotionally available for my husband and basically pull my shit together way sooner than I think was right. Be prepared for a lot of parenting, drinking, edibles, shitting, pissing (the kids and the cat, not me), crying and analysing. But amid the stresses, there was a lot of good too. When life was stripped right back to the bones, I realised how strong my skeleton was. I have changed a lot since 15 February, and I’m happy to share the process and thoughts that go with it.
2020 is the year that changed us all, and maybe that is OK.
Love Dawn x