Dilettante: Did the COVID pandemic change me?

Granted, it isn’t exactly “ha ha” funny, but that’s the way it went. I signed a contract for a tiny one bed in Stockwell, with a move-in date of March 2020. Are you laughing yet? I definitely wasn’t back then. I bought furniture in a panic, as we were being told that the whole country could shut down at a moment’s notice, and I barely had the time to process what was going on.

I knew I’d begun having these weird headaches, and I couldn’t taste or smell anything even though my nose wasn’t blocked, and I would sneeze like I was possessed, but I assumed it was just a mix of stress and early hayfever. In any case, I didn’t have the time to worry about it: there was a pandemic to prepare for. In hindsight, that bit’s bleakly amusing, isn’t it? I caught COVID incredibly early on but I didn’t notice, because I was too busy being worried about COVID. 

In my defence, people had started talking about a period of mandatory social isolation and that sounded like my worst nightmare. There’s a tweet I posted at the time, which is now lost to history, where I could be seen visibly panicking about the prospect of having to spend a fortnight at home. Ha, ha, ha.

By the time the lockdown began, I had mostly recovered from COVID. That was the real maddening part: we knew little of the illness at the time, but everything we knew about viruses taught me that I was unlikely to get contaminated again anytime soon. Still, I had to stay home. Things started spiralling pretty quickly after that. 

In the first month alone, I shaved my head and tattooed myself, using a kit I’d bought online. Throughout the whole lockdown, I managed to cry every single day. I also exercised like crazy, because I didn’t know what else to do. I’d work out, cry, then work out again. It’s all I did, more or less, for nearly a quarter of a year.

The world reopened after that and it was wonderful; it closed again after what felt like a second and a half and – well, you know the rest. You were there as well. You remember. Do you ever talk about it though? Do you ever think back on those months and years, on what they did to you and to the world? I ask because I worry we were too quick to try and forget.

Five years is, in some ways, no time at all, yet the world of early 2020 feels entirely alien from our own. Half a decade ago, we lived such different lives; people working from home were the lucky few, most people had never worn a facemask, only a small minority knew what it felt like to be completely isolated from the world for months at a time.

We then lived through something unspeakable and came out of it irrevocably changed. It feels, in some ways, nearly impossible to talk about the shifts we’ve undergone. Sure, we can talk about Zoom – this company name which would have been foreign to most in 2019 – but digging under the surface is tougher.

How did the pandemic change me? I wish I could say it’d made me better at spending time alone, but it did the opposite.

I crave social contact more than ever; there’s a gaping hole in my soul which can only be filled by being around people. The idea of being this lonely again terrifies me.

Still, I’ve left my friends behind on more than one occasion since the pandemic ended, as the lockdowns gave me itchy feet. I decided to spend little chunks of life in Venice and New York, then in Marrakech, because I refuse to take the world for granted again. You don’t know what freedom tastes like until you lose it, and I never want to lose sight of that.

These are the easy answers; the obvious ones. In what other ways have I changed? I wish I could tell you, but I can’t. I know that I’m not the person I was five years ago, and maybe now is the time to try and unpick those changes. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and distance helps you become a better judge of character. As the pandemic finally starts receding from view, we should all try to take a moment to think about exactly what it did to us. Denial may be comforting, but only answers can heal us.