Since I landed in kiwiland, I kind of lost track of time. However, a few days ago, I was already starting my 8th week here. Sometimes I feel like I arrived yesterday and sometimes like if I've been locked down for ever. Probably one of the side effects of this whole situation. So how is it to be isolated abroad ? Let's go...
SOLO QUARANTINE vs SOCIAL BUBBLE
When I first arrived in the country, New Zealand wasn't in locked down. But due to my recent travel, I had to quarantine myself for 14 days. Lucky me, Ben and his parents had helped me out with the organisation of my self-isolation and I ended up in their bach (beach house) in Northland. No better setting to slowly digest everything that had just happened to me. 14 days alone, with almost no direct contact with the outside, without being able to only go food shopping, that was quite scary first. But in the end, that was a positive adventure !
Reading, meditation, writing, yoga, painting, personal projects and a lot of phone calls punctuated my daily life. With no internet, I was scared of going around in circles but when we take time to sit down with ourselves, time goes by strangely fast.
To avoid going crazy, I had decided to write everyday a diary of my emotions. A way for me to repeat myself there are "days with and days without". I was really scared that this solo quarantine would take me
I was very afraid that this solitary quarantine would take me into a flood of negative thoughts. So this diary was my life jacket, my flotation device. At every moment of weakness, I would dive back into my writings, reminding myself that nothing really lasts...
At the end of the two weeks, I wrote :
« Dear diary, Today is the day. The last of those 14 days of quarantine. The positive side of the story is that I'm fine. No symptoms. I feel lucky because tomorrow I still can join Ben and his parents for another 3 weeks of isolation since the whole country has now been confined for 8 days. I'm so glad. But I'm scared. And I'm excited, too. The cold robot I've become these past few days has come back to life. Leaving this house means bursting my bubble to enter theirs. A bit of change then, probably what I need right now. But I'm scared. Because I'm gonna have to start all over again. Find a rhythm, some habits, a routine. This time, in interaction with others. It's part of my lifestyle, but it also tires me out sometimes. Always having to start all over again. And then I'll have to find my bearings, in a bubble that already exists, with characters from my past... Until then, I thought I had finally moved on. But what if I'm wrong ? I guess only future can tell me. Well tomorrow is the start of a new adventure... »
MY LOCKDOWN ADVENTURES
When I left the beach house I thought I'd join my second bubble for only 3 weeks. But, due to the evolution of the virus, the New Zealand government extended the lockdown for another 15 days. I have now been living with Ben and his parents for 5 weeks, soon to be 6. If patience, routine and perseverance have punctuated my first two weeks of solo quarantine, the last 5 weeks have been more chaotic from an inner point of view.
Finding my feet in a group, a family, or with flatmates is not really a problem for me. I adapt to any situation quite easily. However, what has proven to be more complicated is the management of my personal time and space. As it was already the case during my relationship with Ben, I found it very difficult to take time for myself and find my own habits. I finally realized during this lockdown that I enjoy sharing activities and moments with others so much that I often make it a priority, slowly forgetting to give some time dedicated to myself. This is not necessarily a flaw, but for me, it locks me into unhealthy relationships. In other words, since I myself do not give importance to what I need, I project this feeling onto others and lock myself into the idea that they do not give me any, either, as if everything was about their own world. But I can't expect from others what I don't give to myself... This may sound familiar (or not) to you, but it's exactly what I did in every love relationship I've been in and what I've been talking about here on this blog after Ben and I broke up. Well, apparently, there's still work to be done on that !
And then, integrating his life was like confronting the past while erasing any opportunity for my personal life to arise. In a situation where I couldn't have any sociability, outside of his life and without any possible plan for the future, things were often more complicated than I expected. Usually, taking a physical distance helps me to see things more clearly. However, being locked down, I had no other way out than my own conviction to try not to lock myself into stories from the past. A challenge that will have made me write a full other article that I will share with you in a few days ;)
On the other hand, being confined with the guy who was once one of my best friend will still have allowed me to go out again. After 4 weeks in level 4, the government eased the rules slightly, allowing us to slowly resume outdoor activities. This gave me the opportunity to finally reconnect with mountain biking that I had left aside since Norway. And to reconnect with this NZ nature that I used to love so much.
It's weird cause I had almost forgotten what New Zealand is like... Everything seems both foreign and familiar to me. For example, a week ago, I went out shopping for the first time in two months, just out of curiosity. I came back with fear... I had this feeling of "déjà vu" like when every time I came back to France, but I also had this feeling of being completely lost. It was like seeing a childhood friend you haven't seen in a very long time... I knew my comfort zones were changing while travelling, but I never realized it could regress too. In the end, what was normal for me yesterday may not be normal tomorrow. Lesson learned!
BEING IN LOCKDOWN ABROAD
At first, the hardest part of being locked down abroad was living with the idea that if anything happened to one of my relatives, I couldn't go back... I was well aware that even the French couldn't go to visit their family at the hospital, but the idea of living again a situation like this, from the other side of the world, had left in me a bit of anxiety... After a few days cut off from the medias I was finally able to breathe and enjoy my life locked down abroad.
If it took me some time to realize how lucky I was to be here, it is my conversations with my friends and family, quarantined in France, that made me slowly noticed the differences of crisis management from one country to another. Kiwis are lucky to have a government that reacted very quickly. Numbers have remained very low, making risks of contamination much lower than in Europe. We were talking about a dozen contaminated people a day when they were talking about hundreds of deaths in France. Yet we were locked down almost more strictly than there.
There were no real moments of panic (supermarkets did have empty shelves for the first few days, but once the first wave had passed, it was back to normal). And then, isolated life is a bit like what happens all year round for kiwis. I remind you that there are only a little more than 4 million kiwis spread over the two islands and about 6 times more sheep than inhabitants ...
All this without mentioning the government's response to this crisis, the clarity of the discourse used, the effectiveness of the communication tools developed, the two-way dialogue between institutions and the population, the sincerity and empathy that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern continues to show, the generosity of the kiwis, the light but unifying tone used by the whole country, the use of social medias in government communication, the fresh and modern graphic design, and so on...
Of course, the context is very different from France since NZ is a young country with a much smaller population and we are talking about an island whose maritime borders are a force in the event of an epidemic. But there is certainly a lot to learn from Kiwis ! Where some countries fail, others succeed, even excel... This will obviously have strengthened my love for these islands, but it will also have given me confidence that one day I too can settle in a country where global politics would coincide with my values, whether it is here or somewhere else !
THE LIFE AFTER COVID-19 ?
Once level 2 engaged, (from Thursday) I will take the road again and go down to Tauranga to join Terri, Aunty Fat and my friends who still live there. I'm looking forward to it because I think I've come to the end of what I came to find here. Although the situation is not unpleasant, it is starting to get unhealthy for me and it is time to get back to living my own life. The government's decision comes just in time so we'll see what happens next. I cannot work in the country at the moment, as I only have a visitor's visa. Being here sometimes makes me want to stay and try the adventure of a work visa. But my plans for Canada are still on the back of my head too, even though my visa is currently on hold. For now, I'm just gonna let the world move forward and trust the universe. I am confident that I will land where I need to land, when I need to land, just as I landed here almost two months ago . In the meantime, I'm developing my Coco-Freelance services, with a brand new website that I share with you LaCocoFactory. Hopefully it will allow me to survive a bit these next months while waiting to see where the wind takes me! I'll write to you soon. Love. Co
留言