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Lockdowns, I think, broke nearly everything. They broke people’s relationships. They destroyed people’s businesses. They wiped out income streams. They made people homeless. They eradicated memories, increased anxiety and isolation, and made some people more selfish and insular. While saving lives as a direct consequence of the virus, health outcomes for other conditions were simultaneously negatively impacted. If there is ever an accounting for the policies implemented in response to a global pandemic, the verdict will be damning.

But perhaps the same could be said of personal choices with regards to prioritising healthcare. Certainly, I realise now that I served myself a double whammy of self-harm during that period as a result of neglecting treatment throughout. While I have always been half-hearted about it, disregarding treatment for long periods of time for much of the past decade, never had I ceased completely. Still, in the midst of that period I thought I was doing okay, justifying it to myself as the proof that I could live perfectly well without exogenous testosterone.

Of course it took the person closest to me to shake me out of that complacency. “Have you stopped having treatment?” she asked me pointedly one day, trying to make sense of my heavy anxiety and blues, even as the rest of the world had long reemerged from the constraints of lockdown. I was clearly stuck in the past, mulling over mistakes and old conflicts, and soon found myself trying to reach out to acquaintances from the dim and distant past, in an attempt to make amends for events that now kept me awake at night.

It does seem strange now that I spent so much of that period raking over the distant past. Now I can hardly remember most events from the past twenty years, as I leapfrog all the progress made to return to those awkward days of perpetual conflict with others long left behind. Were it not for my writing and family photo albums, I fear I wouldn’t remember anything at all. It’s as if every success has been obliterated by anxiety, every minor victory completely undermined. Now I am trying to remember all the good times.

The implementation of national lockdowns it seems today was an act of untold societal self-harm. My neglect of essential treatment, in turns out, was likewise a singular act of personal injury. In both cases, we learn from our mistakes. With hindsight, it is all palpably true. The road to recovery is going to be a long one. Made easier, perhaps, by these belated recollections. Perhaps that is some kind of start.