Words in Isolation by Annmarie Miles

I have been in isolation since the beginning of January. I’d been having a difficult time, though was unwilling to admit it. When I laid all my responsibilities down to go home to Ireland for Christmas, I found I was unable to pick them back up when I returned to Wales. The more I tried, the harder it was to try. I hit a wall and fell apart. Since then I’ve been off work and ‘off’ church. Spending all day, every day at home. Not sad, not homesick, not pining, not crying. Feeling empty but filled with anxiety about every single aspect of my life. It has been awful.

I was starting to feel some improvement, when the Corona Virus made the headlines. I was reading, a little. I was trying to write again, just a few words every day. I thought I might be able to go to church, popping in just after the beginning, and leaving in the last hymn. My anxiety was just starting to wane when COVID-19 became the topic of every newscast and Facebook post. I was reminded of the power of words. How each article would affect me. One making me feel a little safer, another making me feel a little more hopeless. Georgie Tennant wrote about that power in her post on the 18^th, entitled, The Power We Wield. She asks, “As writers, speakers, educators, parents and grandparents, biological and adopted - have you ever considered the immense power for education and social change that your writing holds?” I’d like to pose that question to many who have posted scaremongering and unnecessarily critical words recently.

Here I am with an opportunity to use words to counter that, and what am I writing? Hardly anything at all. I looked at myself in the mirror the other day and said, “Isn’t this what you’ve dreamed of? An opportunity to be still. Plenty of time to get the necessaries done and still have time to write. Space and peace and isolation! You’ve been complaining long enough that you don’t have it. Now you have it!” Thankfully there was no one home when I self-lectured. 

Though I am recovering, and ideas for stories are returning, I cannot write them. I’ve had this post in my head for a week and have had to drag it out of me. 

It's all I can do at the moment. But it's a start, isn't it?

Annmarie Miles is from Dublin, Ireland.
She lives with her husband Richard who is a pastor in the Eastern Valley of Gwent, in South Wales. She writes short stories, magazine articles, devotional pieces for Christian radio, and blogs about her faith at www.auntyamo.com Her first collection of short stories published in 2013, is called 'The Long & The Short of it'. Her second collection, 'A Sense of the Sea and other stories,' was published in 2018 and in December 2019 she published her first novel, Gorse Lodge. She is currently editing a non-fiction book about being an overweight Christian called, 'Have mercy on me O Lord, a slimmer.'