Loneliness and learning to look forward with Sarah Wilson

“In a crisis it is natural to want to be with one another in a messy collective…but for people living alone at the moment that is not possible.”

Sarah Wilson

Lots of airtime has been given to the stress that parents and carers of young families are currently under, juggling working from home or job loss with remote schooling and caring for kids too young to understand why everything is different. Amongst all of that there has been little time given to the question of how people in single-person households are faring, so in today’s episode I sit down with friend of the show, Sarah Wilson, to talk loneliness during lockdown.

You may already know a little about Sarah – she’s a former journalist, TV presenter, activist and author of one of the best books about anxiety and depression I’ve ever read, First We Make the Beast Beautiful. With her incredible depth of knowledge on living with anxiety, Sarah shares not only how she’s personally finding lockdown, but also why she thinks anxiety has given her an advantage to coping with and exploring what these strange times might mean as we move forward.

We also discuss how COVID-19 will impact Australia in terms of social, and economic issues, and given the work Sarah has done as a climate activist over the past few years, also dig in to the relationship between the pandemic and climate crises. There’s a lot of commonalities at play in both of them, and Sarah and I both believe it’s important to have challenging, uncomfortable conversations about how we might be able to create a better normal on the other side. Sarah offers her typically thought-provoking, status-quo challenging insights and shares why we need to be both “slow and outraged” as we move forward. 

There’s no doubt that the road ahead will be difficult. Resilience is something we’re going to need a lot of. The question really is, how do we build that kind of resilience, not only in ourselves, our friends, our families, but also in our communities and cities at large?

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Things to Check Out After Today’s Episode:

• Sarah’s website – sarahwilson.com
• First We Make the Beast Beautiful by Sarah Wilson
• Episode 157 – Sarah Wilson on going slow and the power of a good flaner

As always, thank you for listening.