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Tanya Sweeney: Why am I so nervous about the ‘new normal’?

Will meeting friends be an anticlimax? Going to a gig overwhelming?

Ready – nearly – to leave lockdown. Photograph: Getty

Tanya Sweeney
Sat Mar 20 2021 - 06:00

After the last year, some words are never going to be the same again: “lockdown”, “cocooning” and “unprecedented”.  Similarly, “normal” has been turned over and over to such an extent that it barely means the same thing it once did. Mention of the “new normal” rarely comes without strenuous eye-rolling. And yet “normal” is what we all crave.

The only thing keeping us going is the idea that someday soon, we will inch back towards normality.

I’ve thought long and hard about what that might look like for me. It means hugging a friend; the same friend I’ve spent 12 months reassuring, from a geographical remove, that we will all be able to hug again really, really soon. It means getting into a car without worry. It means meeting people in a restaurant and sharing a bottle of wine, and then maybe another, alongside delicious food and even more delicious conversation. It means, hopefully, a restaurant meal without worrying about a table time-limit.

I'm so used to my own company, and the company of the people I live with, that maybe when I come face to face with others, I will feel nothing but sensory overwhelm

It means a gradual inching towards colour again after a year when life has seemed endlessly monochrome. It means going back to the womb-like darkness of the cinema, or the tribal joy of a live music gig, or even just the idea that you can leave your house and actually be on your way somewhere. It means dressing with intent. It means taking a flight somewhere. It means going exactly where you want to. There’s so, so much to look forward to on the long path back to normality.

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So why do I feel so weirdly nervous about it all? Why am I worried that, after not speaking to my friends in person for more than a year, that our friendships will have somehow fractured beyond repair in the interim? That we will sit down in a restaurant or bar, wait for the gladness and gratitude to wash over us together like a huge wave, and feel . . . nothing much? Perhaps I’ve put too much emphasis on these future moments in the past year. Maybe they will feel anticlimactic. Maybe I’m so used to my own company, and the company of the two other people I live with, that when I come face to face with others, I will feel nothing but sensory overwhelm.

This weekend, I had my first taste of a life beyond Covid. A friend emailed me to say that she had bought us tickets to a gig: Caribou, the Iveagh Gardens, Dublin, July. I have seen this Canadian electronic act more times than I can count and each experience is more energetic, joyous and life-affirming than the last. I have danced beerily, letting myself be seduced and entranced by loop after loop of thumping music. Which doesn’t explain at all why, when I got her email, my blood ran a little cold. At this point in time, there’s probably no way of knowing if this gig will definitely go ahead, but having an end in sight to lockdown, after week upon week of non-days, somehow felt less euphoric than I thought it would. I am being pulled out of the smallness of my “new” life. It feels good, but also slightly not.

Don’t get me wrong, I truly want this pandemic to end as much as anyone. And I realise that I’m in a position of extreme privilege if going back into a crowd, for recreational fun no less, is one of my anxieties. But perhaps the “old normal” wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, either.

In the past year I have engaged even more fully with home life. I've slowed down. I sleep better. I'm reading more

In addition to the gaiety of friendship, fun and going out and the sheer variety of life, I also recall feeling exhausted and overwhelmed in my old life. Things were busy, varied and breakneck. Sitting on the sofa was a luxury; a moment of respite. I had the sort of life I needed a holiday from. And then, suddenly and without much warning, I didn’t.

The past year has been overwhelming and exhausting in an entirely different way, but there have been small gifts in among the rubble. I’ve engaged even more fully with home life. I’ve slowed down. I sleep better. I’m reading more. With the end of the pandemic seemingly in sight, we’re supposed to know in our minds what really matters to us. We’re meant to have been learning a lot about ourselves in the past year. Have you made that breakthrough yet? I’m not sure I have.

The way I see it, I can’t wait for a life of opportunity to open up again for everyone. But there’s a treadmill in my old life that I don’t care to readily return to, either. And I wonder, will I take on that busyness and that hectic pace again, just because I finally can?

I keep thinking towards that gig in July, and how utterly strange it might feel to be back in a place and mindset I always thought of as home. It might feel like a joyous novelty. It might feel like business as usual.

Or, perhaps in leaving the womb-like conditions of 2020 behind, it might feel like the best rebirth of all.

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