My Aspie View of the Lockdown of 2020

In March of 2020 the world changed, and my world changed too. For a Christian Aspie, things changed in different ways than for most of the people around me. God has given me an Aspie skill that sometimes allows me to see problems before they arrive. It is helpful, and it doesn't happen in every circumstance, but often I am able to see future problems before anyone else sees them and this was the case for me in March of 2020. My first thoughts were that things would never get back to normal and certain freedoms including religious freedom in America would be gone forever. Within minutes of finding out that my church was going to switching to livestream only for the time being, my mind quickly remembered a movie that I had seen multiple times in my past called "The Printing" that is based on a true story of Christians living in the USSR and being persecuted. All I could think about was that this could be the last time that we were able to meet in our church building and that church would never be the same again.  I tried to mention something to someone about what I thought could happen and I was pretty much told that I didn't know everything that the others in the church knew and that I was wrong, so I gave up trying to talk about it for a while. Thankfully, that didn't happen in my state, and we were able to open back up and have long since returned back to pre-Covid normal, but other churches in other areas of the country and in Canada did have the religious persecution that I foresaw. God let me see ahead of time what could happen, even though no one at the time would have listened to me or believed me.

I also knew that the lockdown would not be good for me and for many Aspie people. I was in a lot of autism and Aspie Facebook groups at the time and was aware of the struggles that a lot of them have and I knew that lockdown would be detrimental to lots of people and mental conditions would get swept under the rug as not "essential" and things would get bad fast. For me personally, I know what I have learned about myself over the recent years and I know that if I don't have consistent time and interaction with friends and other people, I can easily retreat into my personal shell. I am fine in my shell and like being alone, but if I am in there for too long, like weeks or months without certain types of fellowship, then it makes it extra hard to come back out and socialize again. I have worked very hard at not retreating into my shell for prolonged periods of time for this reason and I could just envision myself regressing and never being the same again if I wasn't able to keep up some sort of social life and fellowship with others in person. I know that I am not the only Aspie who has this struggle, so there are probably many other people who did regress during the lockdown and weren't able to fight to keep some type of social life.

I knew that over all I would be able to survive the lockdown because I had what I needed and I knew how to fight for what I needed and had friends to depend on for social interaction, but I knew that there were many in the autistic Facebook groups that I was in who needed more help than me and they might not survive. Those who needed physical assistance and some who were on the verge of finally getting it, had everything cut off because everything closed down. They were left alone and isolated by those who were supposed to be there to help them. Those who needed counseling services had those cancelled on them because the offices closed, and they weren't deemed essential enough. Mental health is often deemed not as critical as other health problems, but I saw other health problems being pushed to the side because "nothing on earth could be as bad as Covid", including cancer and other very serious health conditions. Many people died during the lockdowns who would have otherwise survived and thrived. I knew from the beginning of the lockdown that depression and anxiety and suicide would skyrocket within the mental health community and that it would also spread to society in general because God didn't create us to be solitary individuals. He created us to be together and to help each other. I had a coworker who had his mom die in a nursing home because the lockdowns took away everything that she had that had given her a reason to live. She quit eating or drinking anything except for the one hour per week that her daughter was allowed to visit her. She died of loneliness because of the lockdowns. She never caught the Covid virus and would have been better off without the lockdowns, because even if she had caught the virus, her quality of life would have been better for longer and she died anyway, so how much worse could it have been for her to die of a virus than of loneliness and starvation?

After a few months of the lockdowns, I heard that doctors were now being required to ask patients about their mental health because of everything that was going on and my first thought was that if I could have predicted this and I am not a medical professional, then why didn't they see this coming and why didn't they do anything back then to protect the mental health of everyone in their care? How come I can see this stuff coming before it happens and yet those who have the power to do something about it either don't see it or don't care enough about it to do something about it? Who knows how many autistics and Aspies, along with all the normal people out there, were hurt beyond repair during the lockdowns because the world thought that it was more important to hide from Covid than to help those who needed the help the most.