There’s one phrase I’ve been hearing a lot lately, and in a shock turn of events, it doesn’t contain the word ‘unprecedented’.

It’s often accompanied by a shrug, or a wry laugh. It’s tacked on to the end of sentences, just as the guilt sets in, and it’s come out of my own mouth more times than I can count. “Anyway”, it goes, “it could be worse, right?”

 Look, I’m all for gratitude. I’ve listened to enough Brene Brown and read enough Oprah quotes to know that a gratitude practice can genuinely transform your life. And I think there’s real value in getting a little perspective when you find yourself spiralling into negativity. 

But things have been difficult lately. I’m in Sydney, two months into a lockdown that feels far heavier and harder than the last one did, and there’s no end in sight. I’m tired, I miss my friends and family, and I can’t tell if the constant bad news is worse than usual, or if I’m just more sensitive to it.

And already, I want to temper that sentiment with a ‘could be worse’. Because it absolutely could! And I know that I am absolutely dripping in privilege when I complain about lockdown fatigue while in other countries there have been hundreds of thousands of deaths. I could be in Melbourne, where they’re up to lockdown number 7. Or let’s be real, I could be in the rubble in Haiti, without fuel or power in Lebanon, or clinging desperately to a taxiing aircraft in Afghanistan. 

It feels bratty at best to complain about the minor inconveniences of a lockdown in comparison. But here’s where Elisabeth Shaw, the CEO of Relationships Australia NSW and a clinical psychologist of 30 years, says we’re going wrong. “I hear a lot of people say, ‘I'm finding this really tough, but of course a lot of people have it worse than me’”, she tells me. “’At least I've got a study with the door on it, or at least my children are grown up’. I hear people feeling like they've got to make the best of it, which is a positive, but I think it can therefore be hard to claim the struggle when you might say, ‘Well, I probably look fairly advantaged in a lot of ways, but I actually am feeling absolutely terrible.’”

And newsflash: people are feeling pretty terrible. Elisabeth says “the reality is that services all over town are completely booked out. And so even if you want help, I mean, I have people ring me who just say, ‘I've rung six people. I can't get in anywhere.’ I think the trouble is a lot of government funding has gone into emergency services and crisis responses like Lifeline - which is excellent, I've no problem with that - but what we're finding is that beyond the crisis response, people are needing help from organisations like ours and there's no additional funding, so we've got massive waiting lists. But it's actually within the relational space where we're going to see some of the suffering play out. So I think that's really hard, to get help at the moment.”

I ask Elisabeth why this lockdown feels so much harder, and she puts it down to fatigue. “I think it is the longstanding fatigue, because even if you haven’t been in lockdown, you actually haven't had the life that you used to have, for 18 months. So even people that went back to work - it was never the same. There are a lot of people who never got the end of year break, or the holiday they would have had. All the things that people do to brighten up their lives, whether it's a weekend away, a dinner out, some version of mini break, a course they were going to, or whatever it is, getting their hair done - they can't do any of that. There's less punctuation in life. So the things that we would do as an uplift, you don't have the anchor points throughout the year which you draw on for uplift. And so it's all just flat line. It's ‘oh, I don't even remember what day it is. I don't know what week that was’. And all of that is about the fatigue without punctuation.”

And while it feels pretty gross to be down about missing a birthday dinner or a hair appointment, it’s about more than that, Elisabeth says. It’s the colour that has been sucked out of everyday life. “Online work has been demonstrated to be mentally much more fatiguing on our brains”, she tells me. “So we are literally tired, but also there's too much sameness, which makes us feel mediocre. There are a lot of people who cancelled holidays, who then don't even bother to have a holiday because they don't know what to do with it. If they're in lockdown, they have a day off work. They might still be in the same chair that they're in when they're working. All of that makes people say, ‘Oh, I won’t bother with a holiday.’”

“So all of those reasons, I think, make it exhausting because colour and movement helps us feel fresher. People who were never planning a holiday, at least they would have planned other kinds of bright spots, which they haven't got at the moment. So there's nothing in the bank to live on. And that sense of running on empty is very powerful.”

So what’s the solution? Do we all just start complaining more? Because that seems counter-intuitive. I’ve cried at the news most nights this week, and while the catharsis is somewhat helpful for about 30 seconds, it leaves me with a weird sense of inertia knowing I still have to get on with it. 7.15pm, cry. 7.20pm, bathe the kids. And so on. But equally, toxic positivity is feeling pretty grating right now, and none of us need to be told how lucky we are. 

Elisabeth says the answer is somewhere in between. In the grey area of that not-so-colourful everyday. That we need to admit things are hard, even though we’re all struggling. I ask her if some of the stigma around mental health issues has been lifted, now that so many of us are talking about it. But she’s not so sure. “Because you’ve been given the absolute gracious ‘out’ that everybody is struggling, it's okay if it's you. But because it's so normalised, which is great, it can be hard to say ‘no, but I'm really, really struggling’”. 

Like all of us, I’m finding little pockets of joy in my day – the feel of the morning sun on my skin as I type from the dining table, the satisfaction of running until my lungs feel like they’re ready to bust out of my chest. My kids aren’t sleeping well, but the feel of their warm little bodies in my bed is more comforting than I like to admit right now.

Things could always be worse. But that doesn’t make any of this any easier.