Circuit Breaker – Day 15
Two days ago, I shared a post about recognising mental health symptoms experienced by people undergoing this traumatic period.
While this coronavirus period has largely resulted in little change in my lifestyle — the sole exception being having to buy groceries — I too have not been immune to these symptoms.
The most significant one I’ve experienced is having moments of irrational fear, resulting in unreasonable behaviour. They are something like panic attacks.
When it first occurred, I couldn’t understand what was happening. I just knew I felt strongly against having gatherings and unreasonably angry with people who just didn’t seem to understand the severity of what we were going through.
The second time it occurred, I recognised the emotion as uncontrollable fear. The kind that takes hold of you, your senses, your reactions, and you see yourself behaving strangely, but you can’t do anything about it.
My intellectual side acknowledged I was behaving irrationally. I found that I could not communicate my fear effectively and clearly to those I was speaking to, and those must have wondered why I was over-reacting or why I was over-sensitive.
I wonder if others have had similar reactions. I wonder if it comes from Covid information overload, or being at the frontline, or me being more vulnerable to mental health issues, or me dealing with my current personal issues.
I guess what I am trying to say is that I’m not as unaffected by this as I appear to be. And there are probably others around you who are not holding up as well as they appear to be. All I ask is not to judge them when they seem to behave out of character, and find out what’s really happening.
I can empathise with those who find themselves behaving oddly during this period. These are not normal behaviours as these are not normal times. Under stress, we all regress.
Daniel Tay 