Love-fear relationship

05/11/2020

I used public transport last Tuesday for the first time since the start of the corona lockdown in Austria and this is when I started to realise a major post-isolation feeling.

I believed that I was able to deal with a new illness in the world as I thought it’s just another risk in life, like flying, eating processed meats or drinking alcohol.

All these other risk scenarios are different to this one though. They were me against “it”. This time it is me versus other human beings. I wasn’t scared of something different to me, I was scared of someone just like me, other human beings that I normally feel drawn towards. I started to feel a kind of love/fear relationship. I love seeing others, observing, smiling at unknown people and feeling connected. This time the very fact that there were other people nearby scared me and I worried that other humans just like me could potentially harm me.

So that’s when I realised how different this epidemic is to other risks in my life. I felt scared of one of the most important things in my life - other people. And I believe this makes this crisis so difficult to deal with, we need others in order to survive yet we know they can potentially harm us. And if you want, you could go a step further and think that by not washing your hands well enough, you could even harm yourself or others. How crazy is that?

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