So that’s it. A year of Covid. More of it spent in lockdown than not. I look back at ourselves this time last year and I wonder how they would have felt if they’d known they would still be living in lockdown a year later. Less enthusiastic about baking banana bread I imagine.
What a weird, weird 12 months. I mused a lot on this in my 2020 reflections so I won’t repeat myself but it was hard not to write about anything else this week. I found myself looking at that 23rd March date feeling stunned that this surreal state of our lives was no longer some distant memory, some strange, awful thing that happened in 2020 that had thankfully gone away. To think that we’ve spent over 8 of the last 12 months in lockdown is almost too bizarre to contemplate.
Whilst I did not underestimate the seriousness of the situation or the hell that those with Covid/NHS workers were going through, I – like many of us whose jobs could be done at home – found the first few weeks of Lockdown 1.0 a bit of a novelty. I’m a homebody anyway, we no longer had to commute and the sun was shining. There was always an undercurrent of worry about It All plus my job but on the whole, we were okay. It felt like we just had to have a few weeks at home and then normal life would resume. I realised I have spent most of the last year thinking like that, the novelty long gone, but still waiting for normal life. Still not accepting that this time would change things.
Whilst I know that one day, we will be able to live life without thinking about the Big C, I am only just starting to accept that we won’t be able to snap our fingers and pick up where we left off. The time has still passed. The mental effects have still happened. We have adjusted and we will need to re-adjust on the way out. A year is a long time, plenty of time for our lives to have been completely overhauled, and I think I’m finally accepting that the after-effects of this time aren’t going to just float away. Some of these are good, but some bad, and I know it’s going to be important to be kind and gentle with one another as we all re-adjust. Some will do it faster than others. Some will want life to be exactly like it was before and some will be fundamentally changed.
For me, I’m a little uncertain about what ‘normal’ life looks like for us. We moved to a completely new area in 2019, threw ourselves into an all-consuming DIY/renovation hole and when we emerged, we were in lockdown. Whilst I don’t regret our decision to move at all, I have lived here over 18 months and still don’t know what our life here really looks like outside of lockdown. I’ve also felt a shift in my priorities and learnt a lot about myself in the last year and I wonder how this will affect my decisions going forward. Whilst I’m keen to see how all of this eventually looks, the thought of coming out of restrictions makes me feel a little disorientated because I don’t know what happens after that. Although that’s not to say I’m not ready to jump out of these bloody restrictions with both feet. Bring. It. On.
I sense the next 365 days could be just as weird as the last but I think I’m more ready for it than I was this time last year.
Thanks for sharing, it has been a hard year for everybody, we have learned more about things we would not have done before, I do hope that the rest of this year is better :)
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