Five years since lockdown

A few weeks ago, a community organizer said to me, “This feels like the first year that things have really gotten back to normal since Covid.”

I received my one-shot vaccine on March 26th, 2021. I had been in lockdown for more than a year, my entire life on hold, my world closed.

Previously: Takeaways from one year of lockdown & reflections on lockdown, two years out

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A few weeks ago, I was talking to a community organizer in London, and he said, “This feels like the first year that things have really gotten back to normal since Covid.”

I was surprised — it’s been five years, at this point. But he said that communities are only just recovering, that people are only just starting to go out like they once did.

So I thought about the people I know, the people I’m close to. And I realized how right he was, and I was surprised at my own surprise.

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Two people I know have developed, essentially, full agoraphobia. They may have been a little weird before the pandemic, but they could function — one of them was in university, and the other had a job outside the home. Now, it feels impossible to imagine either of them going back to that old life. They are cripplingly anxious about the most basic of interactions, sometimes even with the people they live with and love best. It’s rare for them to even set foot outside of their houses, never mind doing normal everyday tasks out in the world, like grocery shopping.

I only know what happened to these people because they are sufficiently close, and I only see them because I visit them in their own homes. To the rest of the world, what happened to them is invisible.

There are people I knew before the pandemic who simply disappeared from my life. How many of them just never came out of hiding?

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We all had our lives knocked off course by the pandemic, to a greater or lesser extent. Even if you somehow genuinely had a good time during lockdown, no one can say they’ve had quite the life they expected they would before 2020.

Maybe you missed or had to postpone major milestones — graduating from university, getting married. Maybe you lost loved ones who should have had much longer lives. Maybe you had to raise a kid without any of the support system that you’d expected to be able to rely on.

Likely, the rhythm of your life has permanently changed in some ways. My dad has the same job he’s always had, but his office closed during the pandemic and never reopened, so he still regularly goes days at a time without seeing anyone in person. My immunocompromised cousin used to travel for business all year; now, she can’t even have unmasked visitors in her home.

I had spent the years between college and the pandemic living in a group house, working in the tech industry, and seriously dating two people. When the dust settled from 2020, I had lost all of those things. It took me years to come to terms with the fact that I would never have the life that I’d spent those years building. It was a long and painful mourning process.

Five years after leaving lockdown, I’ve built a life I like much better, but that doesn’t negate the grief of losing what I had, what I thought I would have. Wherever we may have ended up, we all lost something.

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Coming out of the pandemic, I felt like no one wanted to talk about the trauma we had all just gone through. The people who’d had a bad time mostly didn’t want to talk about it or just disappeared entirely, so all I heard was “I had a pretty good pandemic”, even when I felt like the person was lying. A few times, I tried to share what had happened to me, and the person I was talking to laughed in my face.

For years, I couldn’t think about the pandemic without crying. I skipped over any story that included it in the plot summary¹, and couldn’t bear to hear the theme music of the shows I’d watched during that time.

But I also developed a fascination with 2020, even as I found it incredibly triggering. It was like an alternate reality that we had all lived in, and we were all now collectively pretending it hadn’t happened. People’s desire to pick up where they left off was understandable, but it felt like denial to me. Any time I heard someone acknowledge out loud that the pandemic had happened, I was shocked and thrilled, like they’d acknowledged an illicit secret.

In 2024, I started being able to read books about 2020². Three months ago, on the final day of 2025, I finally felt ready to watch Bo Burnham’s Inside — the feature-length musical special he wrote, recorded, and released during the pandemic. The first time I heard one of the songs from it, I cried for hours. Now it’s my favorite movie, and I know the whole soundtrack by heart.

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It’s been five years. The paint and stickers that marked distances six feet apart on sidewalks have been torn away, or faded with time (except where they haven’t). Some businesses keep up their old signs about masking and distancing, too expensive to replace, though none of them have enforced it for years, now. Rates of masking in airports have fallen and fallen, until those of us who sicken easily just have to stay home. People have healed, or at least those of us who haven’t have disappeared, and no one really thinks about them anymore.

The shape of your community has changed. The shape of your life has changed. Some of these things would have happened without the pandemic, but many of them wouldn’t. Time still would have passed, yes, but your life would have gone differently.

It’s been five years. The world has gone back to normal. If that even means anything.

1. The pandemic shows up shockingly rarely in mainstream fiction, but people were writing fanfiction all through 2020 and 2021, and many of them used it as a way to process what was happening.

2. Some books I’ve read on the pandemic:

• 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year that Changed Everything, which tells the story of seven New Yorkers and how they changed and adapted during the pandemic, interspersed with chapters that examine broader social and political changes during 2020

• The Emergency, a memoir of a Black ER doctor working on the south side of Chicago, written in the depths of the pandemic, focusing on the healthcare inequities exposed by the crisis

• Every Minute is a Day, another ER doctor’s memoir written before there was an end in sight, this one in the Bronx, the worst-hit neighborhood in the US

• Please Unsubscribe, Thanks, a sort-of-Digital-Minimalism-adjacent manifesto that resonated deeply for me, about how the world stopped during the pandemic and then picked up as if nothing had happened

• The Anthropocene, Reviewed, John Green’s memoir, written during 2020 and released before lockdown ended, a beautiful capturing of that time of strangeness, uncertainty, and fragile hope