Last Friday, April 30th, I hung up with my last patient of the day and ran down the stairs from my home office to hug my daughter for the first time in almost 14 months (she had come for the first visit in nearly that long and was waiting until my session was over). Even now, days later, it still brings tears to my eyes to think of how much I missed her.
The day counter I embedded in one of my early posts about the pandemic read almost exactly 412: I started it the hour of my last in-person patient, March 14, 2020 and I stopped it moments after that first hug with my daughter. Four hundred twelve days: days of hopefully expecting this thing to be over quickly, crushingly discovering that it would not, anxiously wondering how long it would last, impatiently waiting our turn for vaccines, and, now, being confusingly grateful for our safety and aghast at the horrors SARS-CoV-2 is still wreaking.
The pandemic is not over, of course. Countries' healthcare systems are still collapsing across the globe. I know of two friends-of-friends killed by COVID-19 in just the last few weeks. What has happened in my family's circumstances, though, is that we are all vaccinated and past our post-shot waiting period, so we can cautiously re-venture back into a world that we've become accustomed to fearing, and can no longer meaningfully call ourselves isolated, quarantined, or locked down. I fear less both for myself and for what I might bring home to my family. I still wear masks in public, but I can be in public. I have to be mindful not to offer a friendly handshake when introducing myself to a stranger, but I do meet them. It still is anxiety provoking to go anywhere outside my yard, but I remind myself that I can go -- and I do go, anxious or otherwise.
The year 2020 was vicious not just because of COVID-19. The Great Ambivalence my country continues to suffer was only exacerbated by the pandemic and the anger and frustration between Team Red and Team Blue escalated to new heights, ratcheting up the pain like a nationwide replay of Milgrim's obedience experiments. Government dysfunction at the federal level aggravated problems with food and healthcare infrastructure, highlighting the divide between the Haves and Havenots, between Whites and People of Color, between the I-Got-Mines and Everyone Else and it scrambled the rollout of vaccines into a near free-for-all. I think few of us are sad to see the backside of 2020.
All of that makes the phrase "back to normal" a non-starter. We still have the same racial issues and government paralysis we did a year ago, even if we can point to some evidence of change. Whole sections of our economy have been profoundly undermined -- a walk through any downtown will tell you that. These are the new normal. But there is still a "back to" to get: back to life, back to being with each other, back to what makes us human.
So far, I've had at least one patient per day return to in-person sessions. Each meeting, it feels simultaneously very strange and reassuringly familiar. (Emphasis on the "strange" at first: my first in-person session, I felt so anxious that I was seriously derealized for the first five or ten minutes!) Yet every session reminds me that we are not alone, that this is not a computer simulation, that we are real people living real lives doing real things feeling real feelings. And that seems about as close to "back to normal" as we need.