We know that Covid-19 has affected everybody differently and has had a profound effect on all care experienced people as a whole. As we’re all (hopefully) finally beginning to see the end of restrictions to our normal lives, we felt now would be a good time to talk about how Covid has impacted us personally.
Rhianna’s experience
Not long before we went into lockdown, I was allocated a new Leaving Care Worker. As somebody who finds it very difficult to trust people and struggles to believe anybody could possibly care for me, being unable to see my worker in person made it much harder for me to build a relationship with her and develop the trust that needs to be there in order for me to feel able to access any help when I need it. The first few months Coronavirus was a ‘thing’ brought a range of personal challenges for me, mostly unrelated to the climate we were living in, and being unable to physically access the support that was supposed to be available to me did add to the challenges quite largely.
When you have any sort of ‘worker’ involved in your life, its pretty much a given that your feelings, past experiences, and the challenges in your life are something that you’ll have to discuss frequently, in order for the people involved to try to help you. Doing this virtually has caused me to find this harder, as the inability to gauge other peoples perceptions of what I’m saying or feeling has meant that when needed, I haven’t been as open as I maybe would have been if I was sat across from somebody talking to them. In turn, this means that people probably haven’t been able to help me as much as I’ve needed, as I haven’t felt able to be as honest as I usually would like to. I feel as though it’s taken me almost the whole time we’ve been away from social interaction to adapt to doing this virtually. Just as I feel I’m finally being able to accept doing this virtually it feels that we’re moving back to being able to do it face to face, but that’s really no bad thing!
The Children in Care and Care Leavers councils of our Local Authority are a large part of my social life, and I found it very difficult to adapt to attending them virtually. I do think its incredible and a huge privilege to have had access to technology that ensured I was able to keep in touch with my friends and the professionals I work with using platforms such as Teams and Skype, but at times I do think it made me feel worse. For me, interacting virtually has always felt very impersonal, it has been a challenge for me to pick up on the social cues that are so much more easily noticeable when you are physically with people. Often it has made me feel more isolated communicating virtually, because people are there for me to talk to, but not in the way I’d prefer for them to be. The entire time we’ve been instructed to keep our distance from others, I’ve been longing for the future times I can be in a room full of people that are important to me to talk about what matters in my life, and I imagine there is hundreds of people out there that feel the same.
I’ve always understood the importance of sticking to the measures that have been taken to ensure everybody’s safety, but for the whole time I’ve wished that there was some way certain services could have continued face to face. I feel this would have been in the best interests of the people accessing those services, but that is perhaps incredibly selfish of me, and I know that the safety of everyone is what must come first.
I do understand that the ripple effect of Covid-19 is bound to last for a really long time, but as restrictions have eased over the past few months, I’ve had a renewed sense of hope that I’ll feel some sense of normality at some time in the future. I look forward every day to the opportunity of hugging the people I’ve missed the most and catching up with those I was promising to have a coffee with even before this started!
Emily's Experience
Covid-19 has had a massive impact on how we live our lives. It has been a strange period in time. I had heard stories from my grandmother about what her mother had told her of Spanish influenza, but I never thought I’d see a pandemic. Life has been so different and we have all tried to go about our lives as normally as possible. We have all collectively sat back and watched the world succumb to this disease and try to eradicate it. During this time, life has looked different for a lot of us. At the beginning on the pandemic, just before the first lockdown in March 2020, I turned 21, and for some local authorities that can mean that you are no longer classed as open to services.
Throughout the past year and half I have been able to contact my leaving care worker, and at first I struggled to adapt to speaking through telephone calls and virtual meetings, rather than meeting for a coffee and a chat. I imagine, much like a lot of other people, care experienced or not. I’ve always struggled with opening up, even face to face so the switch to virtual didn’t come easy. At the beginning of all of this I think a lot of us all believed that if we stuck to guidelines, that this would be over within 6 months, and when that didn’t happen, the realisation hit that this was going to last much longer than we thought. It was only then that I started thinking into it more and more. I started thinking about not being able to see my friends, or going to the care leavers council and children in care council. Social engagement is a big thing for me, being around people helps my mental health, and helps me to stay stable. So I started to worry about what my life would look like a year down the line. Communicating over text message, Teams, Skype, Facebook etc is great, and I’m grateful that we have the possibility to do that but that doesn’t mean that it is easy. Personally, I struggle when writing emails or text messages, especially when I am trying to reach out for help. I worry that I’ve said the wrong thing, or I am annoying, and no amount of reassurance helps that feeling. So to adapt to fully virtual, it was hard work. At the beginning, I didn’t feel like I wanted to engage, I didn’t feel like I was actually talking to the same people, it all felt so different, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was just sat in my room talking to my laptop. Realistically, of course I knew that people were there on the other side of the screen, but between not being able to read body language, and signal issues I found myself wanting to take part even less.
Thankfully, we are seemingly returning to a version of normality. While life doesn’t look the same for everyone as what it did pre-pandemic, we are getting there. We are able to meet family and friends and have a coffee, some services are starting to return to face-to-face or at least a hybrid of virtual and face-to-face. I think we can all acknowledge that things won’t be totally normal for a while yet, but if we all keep sticking to guidelines then maybe life will go back to the way it was before, eventually.
We’d love to hear about your personal experiences of the pandemic and various lockdowns, and if you’ve felt similar or entirely different to how we have. Please do get in touch if you’ve got any thoughts on how Covid has impacted the care experienced community!
Thanks for reading x
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