To a New Dawn: Letters of Solidarity Anthology

JAMES COWTAN, 17 26th October 2020 Dear Mum, I know we didn’t see eye to eye during lockdown.

And I know I tend to bleed on people who haven’t cut me. Sometimes I worry that they might leave me because they’re all bloody, so I wanted to write my experience and struggles of coping with the coronavirus pandemic to you in a letter.

Before lockdown began, if you would have told me that I would have needed to complete all my college work on a computer at home and I wouldn’t actually have to go into college… well, I would’ve jumped at the chance to just work on my laptop at home!

But I can tell you now that I took everything for granted.

Because of the pandemic, I was robbed of my time at college – and as a young teenage lad who was recovering from depression, doing nothing all day, every day, wasn’t good for me. I would sit in my room, watching the clock tick by every painful hour. It was like my mind had been sent to an execution.

There was a moment in lockdown where I was sitting in my room, feeling so down. I thought that everyone’s goal in life is happiness, and yet the end result is always death?

So, what’s the point in walking barefoot down this road 32