Just less than a month ago I got married. It was wonderful. We left for our honeymoon, everything was amazing.
Then, two weeks in, we found ourselves in a panicked situation with our home country threatening to close its borders and ground its planes. We made a heartbreaking decision to cancel the UK leg of our honeymoon where I was meant to meet my new husbands family for the first time and have a second celebration with them as they couldn’t fly to Australia for the wedding. My husband was devestated. He may never get to see his grandparents again. It might have been his last chance.
The company we booked our tickets through wouldn’t help us get home sooner and told us to continue on to England and then come home from there. Except we would have been quarantined in England for 14 days and likely would have got stuck there unable to get home. The airline couldn’t not get us on anything sooner or anything that didn’t go through the UK. So over a very stressful weekend we had to forfeit the tickets we had already paid for, and purchase new tickets to get home to our families and parents who were literally worrying themselves sick. We are now in debt due to the cost of the tickets home.
Upon arriving back in Australia, we have been told to self-isolate for 14 days. We’ve done that - we are doing that. We have 5 days left. Then we are both due back at work - only, we don’t know if we’re going to have jobs to go back to. Everything could be shut down before our quarantine even finishes. We have no answers from the government and may not be able to pay our rent come next Wednesday. It’s no ones fault - it’s a shitty situation. And there are plenty of people out there in worse ones.
But the stress is real. I’m lucky I have such an amazing person in my partner and best friend because he’s helping me keep my sanity while my anxiety threatens to rip me apart - that’s if my landlord doesn’t get to me first.
Please - for the sanity of everyone, and to help alleviate the impact of this pandemic - stay at home. If you can, if you can survive without going to work - please stay at home. I would stay here if I could, but I need to get paid to eat and stay in my home. I’ve already had my hours cut, if my job is even there after all this I’ll be literally scrapping by. So please - just stay at home and help lessen the impacts now. While we still can.