the me of now

2022 alison, meet 2019 alison. you're strangers

I had a different post, or posts, planned when I went to bed last night. I have a few drafts which need some editing, and I planned to make those tweaks before my Tuesday night Pathfinder game. But then I woke up this morning and had no appetite.

Some people eat a lot when they’re anxious. I’m the opposite. My anxiety works as an appetite suppressant. I knew, when I couldn’t decide on a breakfast which would work best for a lack of appetite, that I needed to talk about pandemic exhaustion. The rest of my day, where I was frustrated by normal work things but also by the seemingly neverending thrum of “getting through this,” whatever that means anymore, really reinforced my want and need to lift a small lid on what it’s been like, in a small sample.

In my province, all pandemic restrictions were lifted on March 14, 2022. For the second time - we tried to do this at the end of July, foolishly and it predictably didn’t end well, with a state of emergency again enforced on September 24th. I, however, work in a hospital, so no matter the level of being over it the rest of society is, I still live my life according to restrictions (mostly). I’m not here to argue whether or not that is the right thing to do; I think there are a lot of people out there who are more in tune with the evidence and its implications, and have a lot more credibility in providing advice to the public that I do (@nb_covid_info shares many of them on Twitter). It in fact doesn’t matter all that much if it’s the right thing to do, for me: pandemic restrictions still exist in the hospital, and there are impacts on my professional life should I choose to go on a trip outside the country, for example. It is simply the thing that I have to do, so I do it.

But getting through this is proving to be longer than maybe we hoped. In December 2019, I read a piece about a novel virus in China, just a little blurb on the world news page in the paper, and felt some dread, before I brushed it away. If you had asked me at the time if we should be worried, I would have brightly told you no (while secretly consuming info about what was happening). I willingly stuck my head in the sand, largely because at that time in my life, I was having other difficulties and really did not need to add a potential pandemic to it.

Of course, that was not a thing I got to decide. And two years later, I’m still trapped in the middle of it.

I’m lucky. New Brunswick was pretty safe to be until the later part of last year. I don’t work directly with patients, so I’m shielded from infection that way. I live alone, am fairly introverted, and hate leaving my house for social events, so I should have thrived. I don’t like people being close to me or really even perceiving me in public, so masks are great for that! I have, to date, not had COVID. I didn’t really know anyone who had it until things spiralled so far out of control, this winter.

I’ve also had a hard time. My entire job is dealing with biomedical research and supporting evidence-based practice, so I’ve been screaming into the void for the last two years, with a crushing lack of uptake. It’s been confusing and strange, and horribly lonely. There has been no time to process and deal with the fact that in the spring of 2020, we (healthcare workers) thought we were going to die. It blessedly didn’t happen, we didn’t become Italy, but it doesn’t change the fact that we looked around our workplaces and wondered who was going to die from this.

I have never seen, before or since, people that scared. Now they’re tired, they’re worn down, they have nothing left to give. All of this is a totally normal reaction to a really tough time in healthcare - but also because of the fact we never really dealt with the pain of the beginning of the pandemic. The second WHO announced the pandemic, after we had all started preparing, it was sealed: we were never going back to who we were.

I’ve participated in my fair share of jokes about the feelings in pandemic times, I’ve made my pithy tweets, and sometimes I’ve made more earnest ones. But while I desperately wanted “this” to be over in March of 2020, I knew I wasn’t ever going to be the same afterward. I’ve been thinking about this more and more, as we get further away from a time where we lived under pandemic restrictions, because there is such a desire to return to “normal” and to paint anxiety about lifted restrictions as an individual problem.

(I’ve been using my province as the example, because I live it, but this rhetoric is by no means unique to us.)

We can’t go back to normal because we’re changed forever.

This, above all, is my rallying cry right now. I can’t go back to January 2020 Alison, she’s trapped in time, or in an alternate universe where COVID fizzled out, and her life continued uninterrupted by it. Whether we like it or not, we’ve gone through a profoundly devastating event, and most of us are still getting acquainted with our new selves. I knew who I was before the pandemic, and I’m still learning about myself as we ease into the post-pandemic life (post- in this case meaning we’re no longer in the acute era of shattering change; COVID is regular news now). I’m not anxious because I’m afraid of getting COVID (though I am, a little. But overall it’s faded from the Big Bad), I’m anxious because we never dealt with all of those feelings, as a society, and too many in power are seemingly unable to grasp that most of us cannot go back to “normal,” it’s gone.

I started reading The Newsflesh Trilogy by Mira Grant (pen name for Seanan McGuire) on the weekend. This is not a review, because I got the omnibus version of the trilogy and I’m only partway through the second book, but it is relevant: through an accidental combination of two viruses which were meant to cure cancer and colds (which did work), the world is overtaken by a virus which causes people to turn into zombies. The trilogy is set decades after what is referred to as “The Rising,” when zombies became something of a big problem. People live in protected communities, regular blood tests are part of life, weapons and licenses govern where you can go. And one of the characters says something to the effect of “people are afraid of not being afraid,” and “people are addicted to fear.” This is repeated a few times by the character, and it bears some pondering.

The characters, in addition to being fictional, also have the benefit of living well after the Rising. They’ve always known this world, where zombies are a present danger. They do not remember Before. This is their reality, it has always been their reality.

This is the thing that will continue to be a struggle for many of us, in the years to come: we remember Before. Right now there are growing pains between those who want us to go back to Before, and those of us who know we can’t - even if COVID magically vanished tomorrow. The pain and trauma sits beside us, demanding to be felt. And until we all start dealing with it, we’re going to continue to be trapped in this frustrating cycle of not having the same conversations at all. Even if COVID was fake (it’s not, it’s very real, I promise), it almost doesn’t matter in terms of how we all stopped on a dime and changed the course of our lives forever.

We’re all in different places on this grief journey. I just wish we all recognized it.