I woke up this morning to an e-mail from Spot Hero “celebrating” my one year anniversary since joining their parking reservation service. Why had I decided to sign up a year ago? Because I was traveling to Philadelphia to give a talk to a class at the University of the Arts. I went, had a great time, and had no idea that it would be basically the last professional event I would attend in-person for over a year.
On Twitter and on Podcasts, people are talking about their “moment” when they realized that the novel coronavirus was going to be a profound event; that it was going to truly disrupt our lives. For me, the moment was a series of small decisions that were made within a growing sense of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, I was regularly reading updates about the Coronavirus. The very day I left for Philly, the University of Washington announced it was evacuating campus. When I went to the store that weekend, I bought some extra stuff including, fortunately, some toilet paper. I knew that something was brewing.
And yet, when my students asked me the following Monday (the first day back from Spring Break) whether I thought we’d be closing campus, I assured them that it was doubtful. We didn’t have any cases after all. Not counting, of course, the fact that one of my students had been forbidden from returning to Loyola after Spring Break because they had attended the CPAC conference due to the cases traced back there. The next day, we announced we were evacuating and moving to online instruction. Even with all this, I got on a train (mask free of course) that Thursday to DC to go spend the day with friends who were visiting for a couple days. In the end, I’m glad I went — that would be a big day of lasts: last time on public transport, last time inside a restaurant, last time in a museum — and I’m thankful none of us got Covid, but knowing what we already knew, that may have been as much luck as anything else.
This tension between what we already knew (trying not to think about what we know now) and how we behaved is perhaps what strikes me most about these series of moments. There wasn’t a singular point where we realized that things were serious and that basically everyone’s life was about to profoundly change. Rather, it was a combination of individual decisions, actions by the authorities, and random knowledge gathering that eventually got me to begin a year-long quarantine. I clearly remember the first thing I declined due to Covid-19 fears: a Purim party that would have featured a lot of people I didn’t know. And yet, even after that, I hung out with small groups a couple times before the “stay at home” order was put into effect.
For this reason, I continue to have at least some sympathy for the folks who continued to go out to restaurants during the past year: it takes a lot to really reshape people’s sense of what is a threat, what is normal, and especially the relationship between individual decisions and community effects. If the government is opening the restaurants, then it must not be that bad, so the subconscious thinking (I assume) goes.
I’ve been extremely fortunate through all this. My employment was never in any real doubt and the University’s cuts didn’t hit me nearly as much as some others. I can work from home. The stimulus checks and student loan pauses mean that I’m paying down, rather than increasing, my debt. My family is fine and everyone has remained healthy. I’m in a priority group and will be getting my second dose of the vaccine tomorrow. Even some good has come out of it: I’ve become closer with friends all over the country, as we check in with one another, play some video games, and simulwatch movies. I started running and am in better shape than I’ve been in years. The strategies I’ve had to learn to teach through this will be valuable going forward.
But in other ways, it has been really hard. I’m an introvert, but the loneliness has gotten to me now and then. Certainly, my occasional bouts of depression haven’t been as occasional this past year. I haven’t seen my sister and nephews in over a year. I had to cancel some important professional opportunities. Dating has been nearly impossible and some unexpected heartbreak was only made more intense by the pandemic. Teaching takes an extraordinary amount of effort over Zoom and I’m just physically and emotionally exhausted. We’ve all lost a year of our lives.
I don’t tend to put my private life online, its this tension between feeling how lucky I’ve been and how much I’ve struggled that characterizes the year for me. In some ways, it seems to parallel the moments when I began to realize things were going to be bad. On the one hand, growing awareness that something was wrong. On the other hand, struggling to hold onto what was normal at the time for as long as possible.
It sometimes disturbs me how normal this all now feels by now. It’s normal that I wear my mask outside the apartment. It’s normal that no one is really up for socializing unless the weather allows us to do it outside. It’s weird to see people sitting at a bar, unmasked. Completely normal to wait in line at Trader Joe’s. The experts are saying that there won’t be a single moment where things snap back to normal, but rather we’re all going to feel that the pandemic is over on our own time scale. In that regard, I guess, it will be just like how this started.