Remembering My Pandemic Year

We all have a different day that we think of as being a "year" of the pandemic.  For me, it's roughly a year ago today.  My last week of normalcy kind of looked like this-I saw my family, including extended family members, together for the last time before the pandemic at a play that starred my brother-in-law on the 7th.  I left, and went home, but on my way home I decided to stop for a movie in Minneapolis, Corpus Christi, the Oscar-nominated movie about a con artist priest.  That Thursday, I went to dinner, at what (if I remember correctly) was an Italian restaurant in a Minneapolis suburb (the guy I was seeing & I went out for pizza & cannoli). That Friday I took off work, as it had been a particularly long week & I wanted to have a "me day" as the stress of the news was starting to get to me.  I had a giant bottle of hand sanitizer at my desk that I was using enough that my hands were starting to get dry, and one of my coworkers was coughing repeatedly, to the point where we casually hinted that she should take a sick day & work from home.  On Saturday, March 14th, I went to the grocery store, stocking up on essentials to get through several weeks as the news had advertised shortages of foods stocks & basic toiletries.  I bought too much, and didn't leave the house at all for the remainder of the weekend.

And that was it.  That was the last time I saw a play, a movie, my family as a group, my office filled with coworkers, a restaurant, or went on a date.  On Monday, I was working from home, and within a week I had largely begun what would eventually become my life for over a year now.  In some ways I had some ideas of what it would be like.  That Saturday morning, for example, I had gone to the store at the break of dawn to avoid crowds (that was the last time I have entered a public place without a mask to date), and I had packed a bunch of things from my desk at work, though not all of it (I would eventually be afforded the opportunity to clear out everything that remained at my desk at a later date).  For a single man, I had taken onto myself an enormous amount of food, anticipating that trips to the store were no longer wise.  And I knew enough that after that first week, I was stressed to the point of tears, and actually just spent the full Sunday that weekend watching Disney films, specifically the Sister Act movies...I knew things were not going to be the same for a while.

Though there were other signs that I had no idea what I was getting into.  For at least two weeks the snacks I hid at my desk at work were actually just sitting in my library recliner, a sign that I didn't bother to unpack them properly as I on some level assumed I'd be bringing them back quickly.  I waited weeks before I started having conversations with my mom about the play tickets we had for April, or the trips I was planning on taking in June & September, and what would happen to both of those events.  For the first month, I just kind of existed in some state of inertia, watching Bob's Burgers reruns over-and-over-and-over again.  I never actually broke up with the guy I had been dating for almost four months, the guy who just a few weeks earlier had made me a lovely Valentine's Day dinner, and whom I had genuinely cared about, and had been looking forward to introducing to my friends.  It was just too early to commit so fully to another person with so much unrest, and I think we both understood that without having "the conversation."

I could bore you with platitudes about the last year.  I'm aware that by-and-large the last year has not been (knock on wood) as bad for me as it has been for many people.  I have thus far avoided major economic or familial hardship other than watching a few friends & family struggle with budgetary complications or fighting off the disease (never more severe for them than a truly bad flu).  While my emotional toil was not insignificant, I moved past it in spurts, using distractions as I could to keep myself afloat.  Between bouts of loneliness & despair, some of which were related to Covid & some of which were just enhanced by it, I fought through, knowing there was nothing more than I could do other than to push onward.  

And in some ways I made truly the best of it.  I have talked on the blog before about the massive weight loss I achieved while stuck in my house, losing (to date) 42 pounds, becoming truly a different person than I'd been in 15 years.  I wrote more, I watched more films, I accomplished projects of every nature that I had put off, in some cases for decades.  I got better at my life, and one year after the fact I can say that my promise to myself, three weeks into the quarantine when I felt totally lost (and started to watch Lost, self-aware of the titular indulgence, just to feel some sort of connection since it's the artwork that most drives me), that this not be a "lost year" is real.  This isn't how I would've chosen to spend 2020-21, but this will go down as a significant year of my life where I accomplished a lot, where I chose to be a different person & actually followed through with it.

We will all have regrets about the past year.  Those of us who caught Covid will rethink the moments that preceded us getting it, and there will be pangs of guilt in the back of our heads over the people we infected (the ones we know we did, the ones we wonder if we did).  Those of us who didn't catch it will wonder what hardships we endured for nothing.  I took my precautions to extremes that were almost certainly unnecessary-it is probable that I could've, and maybe should've, done more backyard get-togethers at a social distance or taken better advantage of the weather before the winter.  I have taken isolation on as a more rigid task than virtually any person I know.  This will wear less seriously the closer we get to normal, but it'll always be there, the way you rehash conversations you had twenty years ago that no one else remembers, but you imagine if they'd gone differently.

I have begun to hope we are at the end.  I know it is too early to make assumptions, but hope is there nonetheless, and has been there since Joe Biden won, since we heard the first of the now three vaccines available in the United States, and in the swiftness of the rollout.  Every day I am overjoyed by a new person in my life, a relative or friend or a friend-of-a-friend or even a stranger who has gotten their first or second shot.  Initially there were pangs of envy (let's be honest) when certain friends or people got it before us, and that isn't entirely going away.  I took myself to task for questioning too harshly the people who got in before me for reasons both approved (every state has its own rules, we all have our cross to bear), and not so approved (let's be honest-some people cut the line, a fact that they'll have to live with in themselves & will hopefully not be a scarlet letter...there were worse crimes during this pandemic that wanting the fear to be over).  At this point I no longer am doing a mental check of why someone is vaccinated, I'm just celebrating it & helping the people in my life (including me) know what their options are, and the soonest they can get that vaccine.  It's the best attitude we can take-to help get people their safe passage, up until we can get our own (and of course continuing to do so afterward).  Yes, I want to be the person who is posting that vaccine selfie (I have been doing extra bicep workouts in preparation), but I now am confident it will happen, and will happen soon, and so I feel nothing but bliss seeing you (if I know you or if I don't) on my social media sharing your happy news.

We will soon return to normal, I can feel it.  I know there are risks (exacerbated by evil men like Greg Abbott & Tate Reeves who want to tempt fate for their own power), but the light feels close enough as to breathe again.  But in returning to normal, one year later, I can say that I'm not the same person I was at the beginning of this.  And I'm not going to be the same person again, not just in the way I look but in what's underneath.  Some of us will be-some of us don't want to change & will gladly reach back to our normal.  Others will hope to maintain but won't be able to, the pull & expectation of those around us will be too great and we'll go back to what we were.  But I can say with total confidence that I've become a different person, and people will have to get used to that, and I think quite frankly they'll like the new, more grounded, more matter-of-fact, more ambitious, & more aware man that I've become after spending nearly a year by myself.  There is fear in that-we should all embrace that fear, not fight it-but as I start to close out chapters of my life, the things I "want to do before I go back into the world at large," (a blissfully short list, and I'm someone who loves list-making so the fact that it's so short is a sign I did something right), I can feel calm in knowing that I'm ready for this to be over, confident in the changes I wanted to keep from my new way-of-life.  

And I'm ready.  Ready for plays.  Ready for movie theaters.  Ready for restaurants and museums and travel and dates and boyfriends and new people and new conversations.  Ready for new opportunities and new mistakes and new challenges.  Ready for the dawn.  Ready for this to finally be over.