It’s something that Charlotte Balbier, 43, understands well. As mother to three-year-old Harry, she used to rely closely on a network of other mothers near her home, just outside Manchester. She runs a career coaching firm and was always keen to see her clients face-to-face. Then came the first lockdown, which wasn’t nearly as suffocating as she predicted.
“You suddenly realised everything you have; I was finding things in the cellar, in the loft. I was going, ‘Oh, I can live without that, it doesn’t matter’,” she remembers.
After a year of enforced distance from her former life, Balbier’s WhatsApp channels exploded last week when Boris Johnson announced his roadmap from lockdown. “Everyone’s saying ‘We need a girls day out’, ‘We need a holiday’, ‘We need a new outfit’. Suddenly it’s pressure, stress, expectations. That can be really daunting and overwhelming.”
Emerging from lockdown might feel like a sharp fall back to Earth, psychologists say – and perhaps we could take advice from those who have, quite literally, returned to our home planet after a long time away. Astronauts who spend long periods on the international space station take time to acclimatise to life back among fellow humans, research has found, as do Antarctic explorers: expedition leader Rachael Robertson returned to Australia in 2017 after 11 months at the ultra-secluded Davis Station base. “I was really anxious,” she told CNBC last summer. “I thought I’d be thrilled… actually, it overwhelmed me.”
Re-entry fears are so common among prisoners that they have a term: “gate fever”. Steve Dagworthy, who from 2009 served a six-year fraud sentence at HMP Chelmsford and now runs Prison Consultants, the UK’s first jail-time advice service, remembers lying atop his bunk bed night after night towards the end of his stretch, with a pit of dread in his stomach. “It’s a cocoon,” he remembers. “The fear of coming out is probably as bad as the fear going in. I found it extremely stressful. In prison you’re used to things being very slow. You’re not used to demands, having to earn a living, and having to support people.”
Lockdown is nothing like prison, of course; for all the restrictions, we still (mostly) have our freedom. But in recent days Balbier has realised she needs to “start mentally re-adjusting,” going as far as to wonder whether it would be easier to “just stay on a semi-lockdown for the rest of my life”.
“I’m sure I won’t,” she adds, but the thought of a return to normal life is proving overwhelming; a slow easing in is her best chance. At least, “that’s how I’m dealing with it in my head”.