Let’s agree to stop using the phrase “get back to normal” about life post-pandemic

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve heard the phrase “get back to normal” as a way of referring to the global pandemic a LOT. Let’s “get back to normal.” When we “return to normal life.” Even “adjust to the new normal.” But across the board I’ve heard this phrase in relation to the idea of returning to life the way it was pre-pandemic.

First of all, the pandemic is not over. In fact, cases were higher in January of 2022 than they ever were in 2020 or 2021 in America, though those numbers have decreased here in February (SOURCE: CDC COVID Data Tracker),. Yes, the severity of those cases might be a factor to consider but I’m not necessarily here to analyze the data other than to say the PANDEMIC IS NOT OVER.

Ahem.

Now back to my original point. Even assuming that when we say “get back to normal” post-pandemic, we are acknowledging the fact that we are not yet post-pandemic, I am not a fan of that phrase. “Adjust to the new normal” is a bit better. But any phrase that sounds like “get back to normal” or “return to living life” bothers me. Why? Hint: it’s right there in the fact that the phrase “adjusting to the new normal” is a bit closer to okay.

Back at the beginning of 2020, when we thought the pandemic might be nothing more than a few-week inconvenience (oh, you sweet summer children…), the idea of “getting back to normal” was achievable. Fathomable. A few weeks was a detour around brief road construction with an estimated completion date.

Now, it is 2022. We are two years into a global pandemic. More than a million lives have been lost. And in those two years, we have not stood still. Think of it this way: If you go on vacation to another country, you return with excellent vacation stories. If you live in another country for a couple years, you might come back with another language and a sense of homesickness because the country you are returning to two years later is no longer home. You made a new one. Your normal is Italy or Egypt or Peru, even if before that point, you lived in America all your life. You’re not returning to normal.

Normal has long been lost.

Though we resist, time keeps moving. We keep changing. Not all at once. I think about how stalactites form in caves as water drip…drip…drips from the tip so that the stalactite keeps streeeeetching for the cave floor beneath it. Even if we feel in the day to day as if so little changes, those small drops of water add up over enough time. And the pandemic hasn’t lasted just weeks, but years. Even if we feel as though we’re standing still in the midst of this single moment of “PANDEMIC,” there’s still a life pulsing and transforming around us and within us.

I am not the same person I was at the beginning of the pandemic. Even if there hadn’t been a pandemic, the mere passage of two years makes a statement of that sort feel more like “um…obvious much?” The difference this time around, I think, is because we neglected to pay attention to the smaller ways in which we’ve changed through this whole experience.

Think about the small choices you made and how they impacted you.

Did the requirement of working from home during the pandemic lead you to realize how much you liked a more relaxing ease into the workday in the morning? Perhaps you utilized that time you weren’t using to commute to read instead? And you read nonfiction that made you try on new ideas or new habits?

Did the stress of the pandemic force you to slow down so you could stop feeling overwhelmed? So you stopped writing so fervently? And when you went back to writing, you were still exhausted, you tried going slower, only to learn this writing way was better? And now you were able to tackle a book you hadn’t been able to do before.

Think of the great resignation. The transition to picking-up groceries without leaving your car or easier ways of ordering out. Think of the fact that if companies aren’t going completely virtual, many are going to at least partially virtual.

And then, think about how our interpretations of the world changed. As we watched people around us react in the midst of the pandemic, not to mention the conversations around race and diversity and politics over the last couple years, we also changed how we think about other people. How we interact with other people because of those conversations. Maybe you learned someone wasn’t who you thought they were because, under pressure, they became someone else entirely.

And frankly, just think of the life events that can occur in two years. In this two year span, my grandmother went into memory care, which turned my world upside down in so many ways. My friends gave birth to children. Others were married. Old relationships ended and new ones started.

We are not the same people we were two years ago. There is no “going back to normal” because our definition of normal has changed.

Perhaps you remember how, at the beginning of the pandemic, as many of us were transitioning into remote work and remote school and all sorts of uncertainty, how we were encouraged to check in with one another. Change is hard even on the best of days, and this wasn’t one of them. Now as we try to pick up the parts of our life left behind, maybe going back into the office or going out to eat or visiting friend groups we’ve missed, we expect to be able to flip a switch.

But we can’t.

It’s not a switch we can flick to illuminate the living room. It’s instead the rising of a sun over the longest night. The rays creep across the horizon and edge the darkness back, though the darkness still seems to reign over most of the sky. It will be hours before the sun emerges entirely. But it is rising.

Whatever our futures hold, it’s not normal in the definition we used to use. It’s perhaps a “new normal” that we are establishing, but that’s the key. This is a transition. And because the pandemic is CLEARLY NOT OVER, it’s not even the whole future. Things are going to keep changing and anything resembling a future version of normal is a moving target.

All I want to make sure I say is that in the midst of these things, we need to give people grace. The same grace we offered as the pandemic arose. Change is hard in any direction. There is no normal to return to. Just another change.