"SOLICITUDE in SOLITUDE: How I Overcame the Trauma of COVID-19

COMPLETED.
 "SOLICITUDE in SOLITUDE: How I Overcame the Trauma of COVID-19"

The Health Benefits of Art Therapy have been helping millions of people during the #lockdown of the #COVID19 pandemic. And I have used my smartphone for Self-portraits in photos and videos on my moods at different times in self isolation showing my stream of consciousness.

This book will help people to overcome anxieties, fears, loneliness and sadness caused by depression in melancholy in different circumstances of the traumatic experiences of the existential realities of life.

The book will also be useful to students, teachers and scholars in Art schools; art therapists, psychotherapists and parents for teaching and teasing children in parenting by showing the photos of different facial expressions showing different moods.

It is also a morale boosting .self- motivational photo book.
The new photo book, "SOLICITUDE in SOLITUDE:How I Overcame the Trauma of COVID-19" will be released soon.
See my profile on https://www.amazon.com/author/ekenyerengozimichaelchima

Extract from the introduction.
Wednesday September 2, 2020.
Yaba, Lagos, Nigeria.

More than six months ago on Valentine's Day, she called me and told me she was coming to see me. Evelyn is fair and beautiful and with an hour glass figure. Yes. She is a curvaceous young Yoruba maiden. She is voluptuous and often wears body-hugging dresses to enhance her pulchritude. But I always pretend not to be attracted by her sexuality, because I have to perish the thought of sleeping with her. She is intellectually challenged like my woman and I don't want an intellectually challenged woman to be the mother of my biological children. If I cannot have any intellectual conversation with you, it is a waste of my quality time to even sit down to talk to you when I cannot discuss contemporary art and literature with you. And it is very rare to find intellectually stimulating women in these parts even among the legions of graduates of our tertiary institutions. Majority of them are clueless about classical studies, the Renaissance and modern history of human civilisation within the subjects of the historical figures from antiquity to the present day. Evelyn does not even know who was Aristotle or his greatest student, Alexander III of Macedon, popularly known as Alexander the Great. And I cannot discuss Tolstoy with my woman. But I can discuss Chinua Achebe and Ola Rotimi with them, because their novels and plays were recommended books on their reading lists for English and Literature in secondary schools and some classes in the university. Majority of Nigerian women prefer frequent discussions on celebrities in celebrity gossip, movies and TV series; political corruption in Nigeria; social trends and SEX. Yes, they love sex. It is top on the list in their pursuits of the creature comforts of life.
The women gossip in the hairdressing salons and their men gossip in beer parlours.

My woman lives and works in Benin, so she was not with me when Evelyn came to see me in the guest house where I was staying in self isolation before the global lockdown for the control and prevention of the further spread of the corona virus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in Nigeria. I was already practising social distancing before the first confirmed case in Nigeria was announced on February 27, 2020, when an Italian expatriate in Lagos tested positive for the virus. And since then over 54,247 cases have been reported with more than 1,023 reported dead in over six months in Nigeria. And globally  there are over 25,943,401 cases with 18,229,723 people reported to have survived and 862,065 others did not survive.

Several medical doctors said chloroquine cures the patients at the early stage, but the ultimate goal is to produce the vaccines which Russia claimed to have produced the first successfully tested vaccine last month. Other countries have announced their own vaccines, including China where the coronavirus originated from in the town of Wuhan last year.

About the same time, 100 years ago a similar global pandemic, the H1N1 influenza killed an estimated 50 million people globally, between 1918 and 1920. But the catastrophic figures were not verified. And I have prayed that COVID-19 should end before Christma, because the consequences of the trauma have left many of us in different psychological conditions of both good and bad reactions to the situations in self isolation or quarantine. I now have time for soliloquies of talking to the man facing me in the mirror and taking pictures of him making faces at me. And I say to him, "Buddy, you and I will survive to share these our most precious moments of quarantine life indoors with the rest of the world. And show them how we overcame the anxieties, fears, loneliness and despondency caused by the pandemic. " Because, I did not give up looking at the Big Picture of  the bright future of humankind.