'Dear Isolation' / Jemima Longworth
16th May 2020
Dear Isolation,
I thought you might be a blessing in disguise. I was very wrong.
It’s been 2 months for me and there have been a lot of sad days.
I’m tired of seeing people on social media talking about how they’re gaining weight, or the opposite, talking about dieting and getting regular exercise to “better yourself”. It has made me incredibly sad that people are so concerned with physical appearance during the middle of a pandemic. People are struggling with greater things, depression, anxiety, OCD, turbulent relationships, eating disorders and the list goes on. Personally, my relationship with food has been the thing I have struggled with the most. Keeping a regular schedule and not feeling guilty about enjoying foods has been extremely difficult.
7th April: “I feel so guilty for eating lunch and dinner today”
1st May: “I’ve spent my whole day on the couch… my eyes keep welling up but I don’t have the energy to cry… I feel too numb”
9th May: “I can already tell that today is going to be a sad day”
Despite these moments of sadness, loneliness and guilt, I have had some beautiful and peaceful moments. I’m writing this letter to Isolation for me and anyone who reads this, so that they know they’re not alone and all these feelings suck but a lot of people are feeling them.
Lots of love,
Jemima
Unapologetically present, Jemima's work explores the needlessly insistent sexualisation of the female form. Her practice creates a safe space for women to feel comfortable and accepted. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at RMIT in 2019, after completing a Certificate IV in Visual Arts also at RMIT in 2016. She has been in several group shows as well as being interviewed for a podcast and an online magazine.
Thank you for reading this article. Before you leave the page, we’d like you to take a moment to read this statement. We are asking our readers to take action and stand with the BIPOC community who fight and endure the oppression and injustice of racial inequality.
Here in ‘Australia’, Indigenous people are the most incarcerated population on Earth. Countless lives have been murdered by white police, white government policies and this country’s white history, institutionalised colonialism and ongoing racial oppression. Racial injustice continues today under the phoney, self-congratulatory politics of ‘Reconciliation’ and the notion that colonialism is something that must be denied and forgotten, an uncomfortable artefact of the past.
Feeling guilty is not enough. We must take action, pay the rent, educate ourselves and acknowledge that empathy and sorrow for past actions is insufficient if this does nothing to prevent our current reality from extending into the future.
Please consider making donations to the following organisations (the list is so small and the work to be done is so large, do your research to find more grassroots, Indigenous-lead community organisations):
Indigenous Social Justice Association - fighting to stop Indigenous deaths in custody
Firesticks Alliance - who campaign for Indigenous land management, cultural burning and looking after Country