It’s been a long two years. It feels like it has been a lifetime since pre-covid, while early lockdown days felt like simultaneously yesterday and forever ago. As we attempt to return to somewhat normalcy, I find myself with a fair bit of COVID-19 nostalgia, reflecting on the changes I’ve witnessed and lessons I’ve learned these past two years.
I came of age in the COVID-19 lockdown. March 2020, I was 17, a senior in high school, and waitressing after school. I didn’t know where I was going to college, much less what I wanted to study. When COVID-19 sent us home from school, I grieved the loss of my senior spring and an in-person graduation. In November 2020, I joined the thousands of healthcare workers across the globe in the fight for patients and against COVID. I was among the first in my state to receive my vaccine. I watched in anger as people ignored restrictions, cases rose, and people kept dying.
Today, I’m days away from being halfway done with college (yes, I’m freaking out as I say that, and I can’t imagine how current graduating seniors are feeling). I’ve grown so much in the last two years. I’ve moved away from home, met new people, built a relationship, bought a car, worked my tail off in school, left bedside nursing, and made a life for myself in a new state. I’m proud of how far I’ve come and how far we’ve come. While I still work in the public health COVID-19 response and wear N-95s respirators for long hours, I leave work to see friends, unmasked and vaccinated. Not to mention we no longer have to reuse single-use masks. It hasn’t been easy. Sometimes I think of where I’d be if the pandemic hadn’t happened. My life looks so different that, who knows! Does it really matter anyway?
All I can say is the pandemic took things from me, from all of us, but it also shaped me in ways I wouldn’t have imagined in March 2020. I feel lucky to say that I didn’t lose a loved one due to COVID-19. My parents didn’t lose their jobs. Ultimately, the pandemic impacted each person in a different way. Jobs disappeared or moved online, some never returning to the office. Young children will see the impacts of social distancing, masks, and more, for years to come. Millions of people have had their loved ones stripped from them by COVID-19.
COVID-19 changed me, for good or for bad. It changed all of us. It altered the way we interact with each other, work together, and live together. Living through a global pandemic will do that to you, and I am deeply saddened to think of those who did not live to see the other side. I’m sure I’m not alone in these feelings, and I hope my lil’ reflections showed you that processing these big changes to the way the world works is normal and can look different for everyone. Give yourself and those around you a little love and grace. We’re in this together, after all.
HCXO,
Abby
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