No Pandemic?

I often think about what my life would be like now if the pandemic never happened. I probably wouldn’t be blonde or living in Liverpool. RIP to all the Australia saving plans that my friends & I devised in January 2020. It can’t be stressed enough that two years of the pandemic took many things from all generations.

I can’t say I took any physical hurt during the pandemic, my family weren’t sick and we were very careful, especially with a vulnerable child in the house and a vulnerable key worker parent. I understand that people had an extremely traumatic time whether it was social isolation, sickness or losing someone without being able to grieve.

For me, the biggest event I had to grieve was the loss of time. The world stopped for two years, events were cancelled, memories never happened and stories that could have been, don’t exist.

I hate Saturdays

Yes, we are living through history and I’m sure in years to come, I will look back and laugh about the COVID-era. But when the social media memories keep coming so does the retrospective FOMO. It’s very easy to dwell on things that we’ll never get to experience. And I really do think it is important to address those feelings, they are something I experienced most intensely during the lockdown in early 2021, I mean all you have to do is read my “I hate Saturdays” blog. Evidently, I was fed up, sad and frustrated. I felt like the best days of my life were wasting away every weekend by not being able to do anything. Sometimes I still think that because whilst I still love going out, it’s a much bigger deal now than it was in 2019.

Unique memories

But the pandemic happened and there is nothing any of us can do about it. So, yes I grieve for the time lost during those strict lockdowns. But I also look back on my memories, photos and videos from that time in a positive light. I celebrated two lockdown birthdays, the novelty of the mobile at 23 and the exclusivity of my kitchen at 24. Little did I think I’d mark 25 across the water. When things did get better in 2020, I made incredible memories in Belfast with my friends. Botanic gardens were transformed into the hub of the community, and if you can’t go out to bars, bring a litre of gin with you to the park.

Campout > pandemic

I’m also 99.9% sure that I wouldn’t be with my boyfriend if it wasn’t for the pandemic. There aren’t many instances where I would say being in Keady was the right thing for me (Don’t tell my mother I said that). But that night, the first night the pubs were allowed to open, I was definitely in the right place at the right time. And if CM and I’s story has to start at a campout when we were 15 and conclude together again during a global pandemic, with a lot of events in between, then that’s some story for when we’re older.

Moving forward

It is easy to say we all lost out on two years of growing up, going out and doing things. For my sanity, I can’t write those two years off and it would be wrong for me to say they were the worst two years of my life because for all the hard times and difficult emotions I experienced, come special and unique memories and people that I may not have met if the pandemic never happened. And I know I can’t dwell on what never happened because there are so many incredible things that did and if I’ve learned anything it’s that the best moments are unexpected, usually unplanned and don’t always have to be on a big-scale.