And so I decided to create an online diary to record my daily activities while being locked down inside the house – and now this hell runs for several weeks already and it seems with the increasing deaths here in the UK counted on a daily basis, this situation will go on for months until they discovered the vaccine and then eventually welcome the recession. But I will keep this online diary so I have something to look back if ever I survived this nightmare.

It’s the first day of May. I decided to take good care of myself – my physical, mental, and emotional health should come first before anything else especially that I am living alone here in this country. What this lock down has taught me is this: it is not the virus that will eventually kill me but it’s this environment that does not acknowledge my own right for survival and self-preservation – and constantly telling me that I do not deserve it.

Governments that protects the interests of the few, selfish idiots that value their privileges and conveniences more than other people’s lives, people who refuse to see that the world has changed and we need to adjust, those who refuse to acknowledge that you have to survive, too, and you need to preserve youself.

What this pandemic has revealed to me so far is a glaring truth: that the world is cruel and people are selfish. Since the last week of March I started to struggle with sickness – recurring flu, body malaise, loss of senses of taste and smell, occasional gasping for my breath early morning that waked me up even before sunrise. I survived by self-medication for the next three to four weeks. Somewhere in between a death in the family back home.

After the sickness I was baffled by the inability of my body to be productive, to focus on a specific task, to return to my activities, my writing projects. I realized then that it was no longer physical, it was the uninvited friend who visited me again – this was something that wasn’t new to me. It happened to me in the Philippines in 2018 between February until I left for London in September: I can’t sleep at night, I was immobile the whole day, my body was numbed by thinking of these circular endless pointless thoughts, I was just there – inside my room, with my closed doors and windows, lying at my sofa the whole day while pretending to be okay in social media. The killings in the country being reported almost everyday, the deaths in my neighborhood in Quezon City due to extra-judicial killings, the uncertainty of my future because the country has become so dangerous for everyone. The killings were so popular to people. Friends and comrades who celebrated the killings. The hallow populist nationalism of Duterte that was present everywhere – from the bodies you love to the dust the enters your lungs. It was chaos.

And now it is happening again, here in London. And these deaths everyday, neighbors being picked up by ambulances, politicians and government protecting the interests of the few, liars, and like in the Philippines before I left the country: poor people were suffering everywhere and then there’s a steady supply of selfish people who refuse to acknowledge that you have vulnerabilities, too. That you need to survive, too. And they ask so much from you without thinking that you needed help, too.

No. I refuse to be in that situation again before I left that shithole of a country of murderers and matapobres. Today, I decided to preserve myself because I am alone here and nobody will protect me. Nobody will protect me. I need to survive.

This virus has taught me so much about human nature.