This isn’t your basic comeback, what we are trying to do. I’ve written about personal comebacks before. This is more than recovering from the depression of so much loss, the anxiety of an uncertain future, and physical changes like insomnia or substance use. It is time to discuss how we should all venture out from where we’ve been.
Returning to our lives, we’ve been told, will be returning to a world that will never be the same. Did you hear the year “2022” back when this started and think that was incomprehensibly far away? Now our new best friends, those wise epidemiologists, will be right again — it’s likely next year that maybe we’ll look back and say: it was the summer or 2021 that we began to return. When we started returning not knowing when it would feel as normal as it could be. Because when we’ve returned to things in the past, we could better see the future.
But now. Is this the new normal?
“No, it will be when kids get vaccinated.”
“We’ll feel normal when we go to a concert again.”
“Life will be back when I fly somewhere without worry.”
It is my opinion that when we think of returning to something, there is memory built into it even though “returning” in our minds mostly considers the future. We may not have been here before, exactly (as my second grader reminds me of his new classroom), but the element of having been there, done that before is strong. It biases us for good and for struggle. So how can we struggle less?
Returning is Different for Adults and Kids
Teens and kids may do better at reconnecting with friendships on the way out of the pandemic. They will need help being seen again, but their developmental stage means they are primed to be more sociable and less connected to the way things used to be. They have fewer hangups! Adults, by contrast, may be so exhausted from holding everything together that socializing and beginning new things may be less of a priority. A recent survey also showed 49% of adults feel hesitant about returning to in-person life.
For adults, returning is often bittersweet because of our more fully formed memories of the before-times, and the change reflected in reality now. We visit wild places that are altered by global warming and attend family reunion with missing members, but still we go back. What this means about the psychology of returning is that we’ve left pieces of ourselves everywhere, and returning touches each of these points and awakens us to them. Have you ever been jolted back in time by a certain smell? Have you noticed that there is one day which reminds you that autumn is on the way?
Grief Is Leaving Pieces Everywhere — and Returning In Pieces
When we revisit these pieces of ourselves, we experience a variety of feelings.
Returning from a global pandemic is everybody’s crash course in grief. This blog post described this at the beginning of the pandemic. Even if you and your neighbor dealt with covid differently (including not dealing with it at all), that’s part of grief too (Denial! Anger! Bargaining with risk and public recommendations!)
What is important to the psychology of returning as it relates to our collective grief process is that you won’t return to everything all at once, even though you lost many things all at once in quarantine.
Now like a warped video game we want to gain as much back as possible. Big win when you got your vaccine. Big loss when your intended wedding still couldn’t be held. Big win when you took a vacation. Big loss when your friends with kids not eligible for vaccination couldn’t join you. Some of us returned to campus and the office and summer camps in July. Then we masked up again in August. Clients tell me that the early summer months contrasted with the new delta chapter of the pandemic was like whiplash.
Returning Means Dealing With Your Troubles
The pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing troubles. The human mind tries to solve uncertainty with routine, which is why all early advice, including Loyal Blue’s started with these anxiety-calming basics. But if you had trouble sleeping, it likely got worse. If you needed others to help you motivate to exercise, show up to work, or socialize, you were likely left to your own efforts. If you ate too, or drank too much, or worked too much, or had power struggles with a partner, they all likely increased. The pandemic was a spotlight into the cracks in ALL the systems.
It is time to address them.
The very fact that we can consider returning means that some essentials are back in working order. Now people have been able to get vaccinated, send kids back to school, and hopefully address employment uncertainty that came with the pandemic. Therefore this leaves room for a reckoning of what else is important, what we actually want to return to, and what we’ve been putting off. Insights will come to light. What are they for you?
We all delayed dealing with a lot. This could have been a skipped visit to the dentist or finding a speech therapist for a child or a reckoning with an important relationship. We may have postponed couples therapy until we could afford it or get available time (and a private space) to meet. We stayed in jobs and homes and other life situations past their prime because making a move was risky in one way or another.
It is time to return to deciding.
So what are we returning to? A lot of choices, and more decisions than we are used to. Of course, our choices look different than two years ago. But they are there in a way that they weren’t a year ago. In order to return, we need to make space in our brains from all of the dread and uncertainty that has been present throughout the pandemic. We need to fill it with possibility, engagement, initiation. The pandemic has been a filter for many people as what is risk-worthy, what is important, and even what we’d like to keep from this unusual time.
Positive Predictions About Returning
Returning from the pandemic certainly will show that some positives have come out from it. Maybe it will be new routines you established during quarantine, including giving things up. It’s possible your social circle has been tailored to fit a life closer to home (new friendships with neighbors or a comfort level with socializing around home). And you will likely feel gratitude for any certainty that comes your way, never taking things for granted again. The psychology of returning means you can feel the strange optimism like that comes from living through a disaster: survivor’s guilt, glad to be alive for a new chapter, aware of the cracks in the system and your life and the opportunity to work on them, as overwhelming they may be.
My personal reminders about returning:
- Two steps forward, one step back. As someone who wants to believe only in progress, this saying drives me nuts. But I won’t be a perfectionist. Things are better this August than they were last August.
- Read the news before noon, and try for perspective about what matters. When the wind changes direction and the smoke starts blowing in the office, I change into an N95 and keep working.
- I will push myself to keep getting out there. We all have different risk factors to take into account. Maybe you’re part of a vulnerable group, or you live with people not eligible for vaccination. But you can still do many things as a vaccinated adult, and you should.
- Start small, and when it seems difficult, make it smaller until you can start.
By: Lindsey Antin
