It's difficult to feel positive in the current climate, the cold January weather seems particularly gloomy this year.
In the last week even people I usually associate with steel-like strength and resilience have confided that they're struggling with this lockdown.
The combination of endless restrictions, rising Covid rates and a harsh winter has tested people to the limit.
Many feel guilty for complaining while they still have a roof over their heads and food in their cupboards, for as we know the real impact of this lockdown has not been evenly distributed and there are some families currently in financial ruin.
This as been a difficult and stressful time, no one could have predicted it would last this long.
Had we been told back in March that we were likely looking at a year or more of Covid restrictions I wonder would the public have been so compliant.
Life as we know it has changed, and that change was certainly not for the better.
The laws that restrict the movements of the population, that allow police access to private dwellings, laws that make leaving your home illegal without reasonable excuse, would simply not be tolerated in any other circumstances.
To allow the over zealous use of police to impose unscrutinised legislation, rushed through parliament in days, to control basic freedoms of movement, or privacy in one's own home is something we would and should be resistant to in normal times.
But these are far from normal times. Earlier this week the Department of Health statistics showed hospital inpatients with Covid at a record breaking 842, of those 70 in intensive care with 57 on ventilators.
The British Medical Association has now written to health minister Robin Swann requesting temporary emergency legislation to protect staff from what they called "inappropriate legal challenge" for treating Covid-19 patients in "good faith and in circumstances beyond their control".
In simple terms they want to know if there's not enough ventilators to go around will their judgment to treat the person most likely to survive be trusted.
In New York, the Emergency Disaster Treatment Protection Act (2020) granted temporary immunity from civil and criminal liability to the city's healthcare professionals when hospitals became swamped.
To remove the threat of prosecution from over-stretched medical staff is an understandable request, but that should not mean removing scrutiny and oversight from places often trusted with our most vulnerable and precious family members.
We need to make sure that this pandemic does not remove the rights of citizens under the guise of a public health response and that it is always treated as a pandemic and not a security situation requiring a security response.
And while we must all play whatever part we can getting through this awful lockdown, be mindful that what is possible for one person may be unrealistic for another.
This will not last forever, vaccination is happening at a rapid rate, and we need to have a society worth returning to when this is over.
The PSNI who remain in transition 20 years after they were formed, should be careful not to let this time damage and set back any work that has been carried out to build trust in hard to reach communities.
Politicians, in the unenviable position of trying to control this wildfire of a virus, do not want to come out of this being viewed as dictators who imposed their will without scrutiny, harming the most vulnerable people in our society the most.
And we as a community do not want to emerge from this distrustful and resentful of our own neighbours.
If we accept not everyone is impacted in the same way by Covid and the lockdown restrictions then we must also accept that not everyone can or will respond in the same way.
There is a huge disparity in how people are expected to survive lockdown, whether it comes to employment, those expected to work long hours for low pay in public facing and therefore dangerous jobs, and those of us with the luxury of working from the safety of a kitchen table or home office.
This is a difficult time, many who survived the previous lockdowns with resilience are struggling, they need positive news, hope and understanding. That's the only way we will get through this final phase.
