The Kindness of Strangers – some reflections for an up-ended world

The world is changing, once again it seems, suddenly and drastically, unpredictably, and not for the better. All over the world – certainly in the US, but everywhere else, too – people have been knocked off balance, concerned about their jobs, and their future prosperity, their personal safety and health, and that of the people they care about. The concerns, of course, familiar to us all from only five years ago, at the start of the Covid pandemic, the notes playing a slightly different tune (ignoring the dizzying stupidity of being here, not because of a misfortune of viral evolution and our highly connected modern world, but instead due to a wilful act of wanton intercontinental vandalism perpetrated by a clique of small, stupid and malicious people who only seem able to feel pleasure while inflicting harm on others), reminiscent of the bowl of petunias from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “Oh no, not again.”

And for me, the profound sadness of watching people fear losing the things I have already lost, while I wonder what else I’m going to lose this time.

Those of you who have known me for a while know that my life was basically turned upside down just over two years ago. It had previously consisted mostly of working as a small animal vet, work that I adored, and in which, despite my best efforts to make sure my life was my life, and my job, my job, I had invested a significant amount of my personal identity. I had started a part-time PhD, which was incredibly exciting. An unfortunate dose of Covid threw all that out of the window, and suddenly (though it took me six months to realise it), I went from being basically well, a traditionally productive member of society, to being chronically ill. 

Disability can happen to anyone, at any time, and when it does, all the things you took for granted (and didn’t even realise you took for granted) can change overnight. I’ve lost my health, my career, what financial stability I had managed to build up in a decade and a half of work doesn’t look like much now, and unless things change drastically for the better I have to accept my eventual retirement plan, like that of so many others my age, is pretty much “don’t”. I am to all intents and purposes functionally housebound – I haven’t got the energy to walk very far, and my car is off the road lacking the money to put it through its MOT, not that I often had the energy to drive it very far, even before that. The combination of helplessness and guilt at having to ask people to do things for you, constantly – pick things up, take you places – even if they say they don’t mind, is tragically familiar I know to many older people but not something I expected to mark my daily life in my mid forties.

I share this, not in self-pity. Because through all of this, and especially in the worst of times, when I really struggled to imagine what life I could ever hope to get back, I’ve been met with incredible kindness from strangers, many of whom I know only online, who I have never met and, very likely, never will. They have come into my life with kindness, with sympathy, to deliver a kick up the arse when it was amply required, and more than anything else, with encouragement (and wild generosity), supporting new experiments – like my writing on this site, my rekindled work in photography, and the letterpress project that has not only taken over my weekends but started haunting my dreams, too. Many of these strangers have become true friends, but even the ones who have slipped into my life and silently back out of it, have gifted me something priceless: Hope.

I may never be well enough to earn a living the way that I did before (I have, with much regret, admitted to myself that this interruption in my veterinary career is for the medium term at least, and transferred my professional status to the non-practicing register, which means that I am, for now at least, not permitted to perform the smallest act of veterinary medicine or surgery, even if I wanted to). But I have been able to see, like little chinks of daylight, through the encouragement, the generously shared knowledge, and the incredibly kind financial and practical support some have felt able to extend, a sort of patchwork quilt of a future I might, just possibly, be able to stitch together for myself.

All of this has come together vividly this past week, as I completed my first letterpress printing project, and created a numbered edition of 25 prints of the Dar Williams quote I wrote about in a previous essay here. The process of getting to this point with the press has been one of solving a hundred small and large problems, from first principles, often with the manual in one hand, clumsily and, I’m certain, in the least efficient way possible. 

The press only came to live with me because some very special people not only vigorously encouraged me to grasp the opportunity to acquire it when it came along, but helped me solve the logistics of relocating it from Sussex to Cornwall (You know who you are. Thank you!). And the true joy of this project is in paying debts (woefully asymmetrically), and saying thank you. Of the twenty five prints, fifteen are set aside as supporter rewards to raise funds for… well, you guessed it, more print supplies (and if you’d like one, at the time of writing, nine are still up for grabs). The other ten are being sent from one end of the country to the other, as tiny tokens of my gratitude to those who have gone above and beyond in their kindness, enthusiasm, and encouragement to pursue these half-baked creative plans.

And so in the face of a world that seems to be going so far off the rails that I sometimes stare, and wonder if I might be hallucinating, this week has still, somehow, felt blessed with gratitude. Whatever we face, we face it together. People are people everywhere, and most people are kind, and honest, and generous, no matter how it might seem at times. To trust in our communities – online and elsewhere – to be there for us when we need them, and to be there for them, can seem impossible; and yet, again and again, over these two often impossible-feeling years, it has been true for me. I believe it can be true for all of us, because it must.

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