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How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.

This week, I read a lot of interesting articles that underlined the importance of: a) taking the time to grieve the losses inflicted by COVID (not just the loss of loved ones or the loss of physical health for those suffering from long COVID, but also the loss of our routines, our certainty about the future, potential friendships, experiences, etc.) b) recognizing that COVID is a mass trauma that is bound to have specific psychological effects. I suspect that the timing is because we are one year into the pandemic, and anniversaries are usually a time to reflect. The articles on grief remind me of a quote from The Office, where Michael says: "It is my job to get them all the way through to acceptance, and, if not acceptance, then just depression. If I can get them depressed, then I'll have done my job." It's weird because I feel depressed all the time and the memes on Zoom Memes for Self Quaranteens suggest that pretty much everyone (at least young people) are going through something like depression. So I'd have assumed we were "almost all the way there". And yet when I think about it, I realize that as a society, we haven't even begun the grieving process. As a society I feel like we're stuck in denial. Denial in the sense that I keep hearing this constant refrain of "Once all this is over, everything will be back to normal". It's not just individuals I hear this from, it's institutions. As far as I can gather, my university is planning for everything to resume "as normal" starting this fall: all students living on campus, all or mostly in-person classes, student gatherings permitted, with maybe the only big change being masks required in public places. But the problem is that the more people repeat this refrain of "everything will be back to normal", the more they delay that process of realizing that normal is never coming back. Sure, the *trappings* of normality will return: we'll be able to go back to the office, hang out with our friends guilt-free and go to bars and such. But from a psychological perspective, we will never be the same again. We will never go out and meet new people with as much reckless abandon as we used to. We will never plan our future with the same confidence that things will work out. We will never have the same faith and trust we used to in our institutions. I think people repeat this refrain of "back to normal" so often because they don't want to acknowledge that they lost something. They want to imagine that quarantine and shutdown was like taking down a tent, folding it up, and putting it in a closet until better weather comes around. Whereas in reality, quarantine and shutdown was more like demolishing a house. Sure, you can rebuild the house according to your initial blueprint, but your new house will never be the same as the old house. Maybe the paint you used for the outside just isn't sold anymore, or maybe the stair steps are just a little too high. That doesn't mean that your new house is bad; in fact, your new house may be better in some ways (maybe you got double-paned windows and you rewired the electricity to optimize for solar panels). But I don't think you can really fully appreciate the new house until you accept that the old house is gone and trying to resurrect it is futile. I personally find myself hard pressed to treat my personal losses as something to grieve when society does not see it that way. It's frustrating because I do think that I need to go through that grieving/healing process, and as a society we need to do so as well. But it's hard when no one else sees it that way. I keep hearing over and over from well-meaning friends, through social media, through some news articles: "Don't fret, don't worry, everything will go back to normal eventually". That was a nice message maybe in March or April 2020, But one full year into this pandemic, I'm really starting to get ticked off by that well-meaning message. I mean, to take this to Gogolian extremes, imagine its being 2025 and fears about COVID still abounding, and people still saying "Don't worry, everything will go back to normal eventually". At some point, you have to realize that "normal" in the sense of the Before Times is never coming back. The longer you put that off, the harder you're going to have to work to live with that sense of loss and figure out what you're going to do next. I think this all the time when seeing my classmates taking gap years in the hope that campus life will be "back to normal" by the time they finish their gap year, or enrolling last minute in a fifth-year master's so that it can replace the "normal senior year" they lost. I can understand the sentiment behind taking a gap year or coterming: you want to buy time for things to at least be *less* miserable than they are now (and in all fairness, I do despise Zoom University). At the same time, how many gap years are you willing to take before things are "normal enough" for you to come back? I don't feel like a lot of people asked themselves this hard question before making these big decisions, and as the next academic year approaches with little to no certainty about how "normal" things will be, I worry it will come back to haunt them. The mass trauma article was by the BBC, and I found it fascinating because I think that much as we have repeated the constant refrain of "once this is over, everything will be back to normal", we have also refused to acknowledge the massive psychological toll that the sustained, prolonged fear of disease and death, coupled with the brutal economic toll and the mass isolation, has already had and will continue to have down the line. A lot of us act and talk like we're the ones who are crazy for not having "adapted" and "proven our resilience" "already". I am personally guilty of constantly scolding myself: "I should be grateful for all my privilege, I shouldn't be so dour and gloomy". Or: "I should have gotten used to Zoom University already, so any lack of motivation I experience is a sign of personal weakness". I think there are two things at play: the individual need to believe that we are invincible to COVID gloominess, and the relentless demands of a capitalist world for us to keep our heads down and keep producing. (Thanks, capitalism!) I worry that I'm not coping in a healthy way (I feel addicted to social media in that I delay meals and exhaust my eyes just to see one more "interesting" post and suffer from restlessness and intense boredom when I block social media), and I also fear that COVID trauma is going to make me into a fearful, paranoid, dour, even spiteful person.