Sketchbook Sunday: 2nd July 2023

I drew this fairly early on into the 2020 covid lockdown. 

My work had told us to go home from around mid-March. At the time I thought it was only going to be a couple of weeks. At the time I actually posted on Instagram about how weird it was “packing up my desk and heading home for two weeks”. Two weeks turned into two months and before I knew it, I wouldn’t set foot back into that office until April 2021. By that point I had moved out of my two bed flat in London into a house in Peterborough and my day-to-day life was unrecognisable from what it had been in 2019. 

Generally speaking, I thrived during the lockdown. Anxiety has been a concern of mine for a few years now and there was a great sense of relief at not having to deal with the day-to-day niceties of heading into central London every single day. It was reassuring and I felt so safe in my flat with my partner and what felt like all the time in the world. Suddenly we’d regained hours that had been previously lost to the commute and other commitments. 

That being said, I missed my friends. Along with anxiety, I’ve never found it easy to make friends. I’m too trusting in a lit of people, and when you combine that with other social difficulties – the particulars of which I won’t go into now – it was a surreal time. Virtual happy hours and scheduling 1 on 1 video calls with friends became bread and butter. I soon fell into a comfortable and happy rhythm and honestly those nine months from March to December 2020 might have been the calmest and most stable months I’d experienced in years. 

It was during this time that I drew Alone In A Crowd: It epitomised how I felt about where I was at before we’d all been sucked into this parallel universe. Just because I’d been physically surrounded by people, didn’t mean I wasn’t alone. 

Don’t get me wrong, there are times where I miss the spontaneity of just grabbing a drink with a friend, or popping into town suddenly for a night out. But the reality is that there’s always another event, another party, another night out. There’s always something you have to miss and eventually, you wind up emotionally and mentally burnt out. 

Proximity means nothing. Three of my closest friends today: one lives two doors down, one lives 80 miles away and one splits her time between London and Budapest. They’re all amazing and I know that it doesn’t matter which I call, she’s pick up and always have time for me. 

We make our own connections and relationships in this world. Just because mine are different to other people’s doesn’t mean they’re wrong. They’re just different.