Awakening to a new reality

I woke with a start.

Bedsheets stuck to my skin. Razorblades in my throat. My temperature had soared overnight to 39. My body rocked with aches and pains, the onset of something pernicious. Any other time, I’d have been concerned. But this was different. This was the second week of the first Covid-19 lock-down.

Imposing a self-isolation at home isn’t easy. Sleeping on the couch, away from your family. Eating alone. It’s unsettling. Alienating. Being treated as if you have the Plague in your own home is as unfamiliar as it is unwelcome.

A week later I was flooded with relief. Tonsillitis was confirmed when antibiotics targeted and destroyed the bacteria in my body. Falling ill in a world turned upside-down by a sweeping pandemic—with no bias, that follows no rules, that attacks with impunity—has given me a new respect for hand-washing.

Until this passes, we have awakened to a new reality. Commerce, retail, sport, social interactions, work, the environment, everything shifts. And we adapt.

This characteristic we carry—an ability to reshape to new environments and circumstances; the world changes, it shifts, and we shift with it—is the prescient theme of my early 2020-released second book, The Between.

Ana Moon’s best friend Bea has vanished. Her house has changed. Her parents have become strangers. She has fallen into a world that is not her own. Guided by the mysterious Malik and his Pathfinders – world-jumping guardians of hidden gateways from one world to the next – Ana must travel across seven Earths to get Bea back.

I know, it feels a little opportunistic to speak about my book when people are dying, but sometimes the only way to cope is to turn to what gives meaning. And, I think we can all relate to this feeling. Being thrown into the unfamiliar. Feeling out of place and out of depth. Losing a sense of ourselves.

“First you lift. Then you float. Then you Fall.

That’s how it happens—the Falling. It’s frightening and it hurts. It feels as if your bones are being crushed. Your insides, ripped out. Your body is being force-fed through a meat grinder. It disorientates, disturbs and it dazzles the mind. Flips normal upside down, inside out and back to front. But it’s not the Falling that matters.

It’s what happens after.”

Finding a way through, finding hope and surviving, is where we find ourselves. This too will pass. And on the other side? Maybe something better.

A new world.