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Cash, Handshakes and Crowded Trains

I live in Melbourne, which claimed to be "the world's most liveable city", until COVID hit us harder than anywhere else in the country.

For me, 2020 was a bit of a weird time for my city and the world to be turned upside-down by a pandemic.  The reason was, I'd spent the last two years fighting hard against obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which hit me hard in 2018 following hospitalisation with a life-threatening illness and ongoing physical disability. 

My OCD manifested in a few ways, but the main one was around the avoidance of germs.  So, it was somewhat surreal to suddenly have everyone else fretting along beside me, but with a slightly different emphasis.

While the reality of OCD was very clear to me, it was often spoken about it a way that I found profoundly irritating.  The preoccupations and self-protection mechanisms of OCD suffers were described as being completely ridiculous, when in fact many (though not all) are grounded in truth, albeit taken to unusual lengths.

I tried writing about this frustration, but struggled to articulate myself clearly.  Once the pandemic began, the hypocrisy, or perhaps wilful misunderstanding, of OCD symptoms became much clearer.  "Wash your hands!" every organisation suddenly started desperately repeating.  It was the exact action I had repeatedly been told not to do for many months prior.

Early in 2020, I wrote an essay with those three words as the title, but as the pandemic evolved, so did the essay.  The final version was Cash, Handshakes and Crowded Trains, submitted to Bent Street Journal in October 2020, and published in December.

Reading it now, I can't help but feel slightly sickened by my naivete.  I believed that the pandemic was almost over in Australia.  We didn't know that the worst was yet to come.

Nonetheless, it documents seven months in locked-down Melbourne, and I hope helps others think differently about the line between illness and health.  I loathe the phrase "common sense", not because good decisions are uncommon, but because the phrase is often used in a way that has little to do with rationality and more to do with enforcing social norms. 

As I write this in 2022, have the norms changed?  Somewhat, but not always in useful ways.  It's a relief to see more people staying home when they're sick, but one unfortunate impact of COVID is the shift towards using pump-pack sanitiser in place of actual handwashing.  Yes, it kills COVID, but is mostly-useless against some other viruses, such as all of those that cause gastro.  Touching that pump-pack is just spreading those gastro-germs to whoever touches it next.  

Gross, right?  Maybe there would be less contagious disease with more people on the vigorous-handwashing bandwagon.  Isn't that "common sense"? 




Photo credit: stormseeker via unsplash

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