Those who know me may be surprised to learn that this post isn’t about the One Direction song.
It’s actually about coronavirus, and more specifically, my mindset and attitude towards it.
The pandemic is weird. It’s deeply weird. I know that goes without saying, but often the obvious things are the most important things to say – whether that’s “I love you” or “don’t drive drunk”. They bear repeating largely because of, rather than despite, their obviousness. If something’s novel to begin with, repetition causes it to lose its key characteristic, whereas if something’s obvious from the start, it was only being said because its repetition had value. But I digress. The pandemic is weird.
It’s warped time. Days and weeks and months are blended by their homogeneity. People refer to “the before times” but they’re only being a little bit ironic. We talk about the time after Christmas as if it’ll be better, just as we talked about the beginning of the new academic year, and indeed the beginning of Summer. One must admire our endless gift for hope.
People. Crowds. Groups. They’re all weird. Seeing pictures and videos from before the pandemic is… an unsettling experience now. Any time I do anything I’m questioning whether it’s fine, or even legal. I’m hoping that visiting other people’s households becomes legal again soon, but who knows?
But this isn’t the weirdest thing, really. These bits are all practical, logistical, real points. They’re tangible, at least in a sense. The weirdest thing is my response to it all.
I think I’ve been fairly resilient, for the most part. The first couple of weeks were tricky, but I’ve landed on my feet. I had a good summer, living with acquaintances and strangers who became friends, in a beautiful seaside town which is becoming more and more like home. Motivation has come and gone – but that’s always been the case, and I can’t really blame the pandemic. I’ve settled into some semblance of a rhythm (not quite a routine, but a pattern of behaviour – riffs on a theme, if not actual repetitions or loops).
And now I don’t know if I want it to end.
Obviously, I do want it to end. I want this all to be over. I want to travel (even shop) without guilt; I want to know that I can go home for Christmas; I want to go to a friend’s house for dinner and a drink; I want to go to the pub; part of me even wants to go to 601. If I could flip a switch and end the pandemic, I wouldn’t even hesitate. Yet at the same time, it‘s going to be difficult adjusting to normalcy again, if and when the opportunity presents itself. Normalcy’s gone, and it’s been replaced with this very different strand of normalcy. It’s as if McDonald’s suddenly started serving their fries cold (as a matter of course rather than just by accident) and then all of a sudden they offered you piping hot fries and you were worried that they’d burn your mouth. What does normal even look like? This pandemic has held us hostage so long that Stockholm Syndrome is beginning to take hold. The prison is becoming a palace, if only an imagined one.
What do I do when I don’t have the pandemic as an excuse any more? My motivation will of course continue to ebb and flow as it always has, but I won’t be able to brush off the ebbs as down days resulting from the pandemic. I won’t always want to socialise, but I won’t be able to use social distancing as an excuse. Though I can already imagine the breakup e-cards that say “let’s social distance” – maybe there’s a market there.
Maybe I’ve just forgotten how weird normalcy always was. The pandemic’s an excuse not only for my laziness, but also for a Generally Strange State Of Affairs. What’s going to happen when things become “normal” again but they don’t return to normal, or at least the state of normality that we imagined we were living in? Of course, we’re only able to imagine things as being normal because we’re now so far removed from them. But really, things were already quite weird. Not in such a tangible way, of course. It wasn’t like you could put your finger on it and be like, “it’s currently illegal to have a friend over for a drink”, and say “that’s weird” in the way that we can at the moment. But for a long time now, there’s been a strange sense of unreality.
I think I fear that unreality. A return to intangible weirdness, rather than tangible. It’s nice to be able to say that everything’s weird, and for people to know what you mean. I suppose we’ll find out what normal looks like at some point. I’m not going to get my socks wet by wading into the waters of Pontification About The New Normal. That’s not really my style – I’ve got no idea what the future looks like. But I think it’ll be weird, just in a different way than the present. And I don’t really know how I feel about that. The weirdness of the present has become oddly comforting.