I spent the past few weeks trying to figure out what the actual date would be of our “pandemic anniversary.” Would it be the day of the first COVID-19 case in the United States? The day my state issues the Stay at Home Advisory? The day my office made the official decision to shift all of our work to online? My first day actually working fully from home?
January 21. March 23. March 16. March 20.
I’m sticking with March 16. When my office instructed us to transition to working from home. That’s when things really changed for me.
In the most poetic irony possible, I ended up spending a good part of March 16th 2021 feeling sick… as side effects from my second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. I’m all good now, alhamdulillah, and in a week I will be considered “fully vaccinated” according to the CDC. I never would have expected to have the vaccine in me within a year of the virus emerging. I also did not expect that we would be continuing social distancing and staying at home a full year later.
I spent this morning reading my posts from last year, trying to remember what life was like back in the early days of this pandemic. While a few things have changed, it does feel like the majority of pandemic-life has remained generally the same for me. I still wear masks everywhere I go and use hand sanitizer constantly. I still avoid public places with the exceptions of basic necessities and visiting the parents/in-laws. I still haven’t hugged my cousins, aunts and uncles in over a year now. That one hurts more than ever.
Changes that have occurred:
I started working in my office again. I go in when I have to meet a physical person, and I stay home otherwise, which usually ends up being the first half of the day working from home and the second half working in-person.
I finally experienced those I closely know getting COVID. Close family members. People I work with. Relatives of friends. Some have gotten seriously ill and some have died. Others went through it and came out on the other side generally healthy and recovered. I have been blessed that my immediate family (spouse, parents, siblings, in-laws) have been safe from infection so far. Alhamdulillah.
While we still limit the big grocery store trips to twice a month, we feel fully comfortable making small trips as needed throughout the week.
I ate inside an actual restaurant one whole time in the past year, and visited one single home of a person who was not my parent or sibling. All while fully masked. (Yup, I still believe myself to be on the more conservative end of the social distancing spectrum.)
The biggest change: We got a cat. In July of last year, we adopted a kitten. I’m pretty sure a huge part of why I didn’t blog much in the second half of 2020 is because I spent all my free time with my cat. He has been such a joy in life and I can’t believe I was a borderline animal hater before having him. (Okay, I didn’t hate animals. I just got annoyed at how obsessed people were with their pets. And now that’s me.)
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
I was looking through the pictures on my phone recently and stumbled down an unexpected memory lane when I got to March, April and May of 2020. That was such a scary and unpredictable time, and the most surprising sensation occurred when I was reminiscing back: I felt nostalgia. I was smiling. I fondly sifted through all of the moments I captured, remembering how we stumbled our way through this new world.
Remember the cooking adventures phase? The puzzle phase? The apocalyptic grocery store aisles? The daily nature walks? As I look back on the past year, the most meaningful blessing this pandemic gave my household (in addition to our continued health) is the habit of learning to make things we would ordinarily buy in a restaurant. Through trial and error, my husband and I can now make at home Thai curry, macarons, sushi, donuts, chicken adobo, creme brulee, babka, garlic knots and different kinds of tea lattes.
I’m excited to feel the weather warming up again. It is giving me this weird nostalgia for picnics in the driveway and taking walks around the block.
With the increased availability of the vaccine, I feel the world starting to go “back to normal” and part of it makes me sad. I felt so much global solidarity last year, and it feels like that has been slowly going away as people resume normal life.
At the same time, I’m wary to find out how the pandemic changed us. As we all retreated back into our little “pods,” we grew and developed away from each other. Will it feel jarring to witness the seemingly sudden change in others as they witness how I’ve changed? In losing incidental social interactions, we lost the natural ability for small annoyances to be smoothed over by subsequent positive interactions. We have judged each other for being too rigid or too loose with COVID precautions and created mental categories for everyone based on their responses to the pandemic. We have reacted in very different ways to the demonstrations of social injustice and political action largely behind a digital screen and had little chance to speak in person and with nuance to each other about these incidences.
An underlying all of this, some of us experienced huge losses in our family structure and had to grieve largely alone, while others of us gained exciting additions to our families and with few to celebrate it. How will we hold space for both without diminishing the importance of either?
Maybe Ramadan will provide some answers. We were surprised the pandemic touched Ramadan last year; who expected it to continue this year as well?
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
I guess another change that occurred in my own mind: I used to operate with the assumption that this pandemic will end soon and then got surprised when it continued. Now I operate with the assumption that this will continue until further notice. And I feel surprised when guidelines are eased, cases go down, and more get vaccinated. Some of my loved ones are planning to get married this year, and I’m in this weird space of both hoping the pandemic adaptations to be unnecessary by that point while also feeling like nothing will actually change and it will be a masked, distanced, anxious experience. I’m choosing to proceed with guarded excitement.
Islam On My Mind 