Many months ago I was thinking about how time felt different since Coronamageddon started. It seemed like a good thing to write about and explore. But I was swept up in the Corona tide and pushed along and haven’t been doing much writing at all. Getting swept up in daily activities isn’t so different than what happened in pre-Coronamageddon times, but the scope of it, when looking back, has a Corona tint to it.
I’m calling this feeling of time strangeness “The Coronamageddon Time Tunnel”. Shit’s wacky. It’s been wacky, and even though we’re past the one year mark and people are being vaccinated and the weather is getting warm again, it’s still wacky.
It’s common, over the past few years, for me to think of a specific event and feel like it’s hard to believe that it’s already been so many years since that event happened. But then when I think about all the things that have taken place in that time interval, it feels like it could have been so much longer. This same feeling has been happening to me over the past year, but the feeling is about events that have happened during the same year.
Remember when they closed the schools? Yeah, that was just about a year ago but think about all the stuff that’s happened since then.
Or remember when you first started hearing about this virus? At first I was super skeptical and figured this was just another thing that the media was overblowing to get more views and clicks. It took less than a week for me to change my mind and start wondering why they hadn’t already closed the schools. But that feels like three years ago.
Remember the election? That was only a few months ago.
Remember that public shooting? Which one?!
Then if we look at how time is moving day to day it gets weird on that level too. There continues to be so much uncertainty and so much changing information. There continues to be so much stress added on top of the normal day to day stress that we already had. And during this past year, when our options of where to go and what to do were so limited, the days started to run together even more than they used to. It’s easy to get to the end of a week, look back and just see a blur. There were not five days in that work week. There was one long blur.
A couple of months ago, I started to feel like this time distortion was ending. With the vaccines, there was some hope and we seemed to be getting used to “the new normal” (Do you hate that term as much as I do?) But that feeling quickly faded. Time is still all twisted up. When everything is blurry and there’s less unique events to look forward to and less unique events to give a marker to the time passed and everyday is go to work, come home, don’t really do any other stuff, the time tunnel continues to eat up 2021. When everyday is the same, there are no separate days to remember. What makes today different than yesterday if you’re doing the same things, going to the same places and don’t have anything else to look forward to?
There was someone that I used to see about once per month pre-Coronamageddon. I cancelled my March 2020 appointment and didn’t see this person again until February 2021 after I’d received two doses of magical Corona vaccine. I saw this person again today for the fourth time in a row now. It felt pretty normal, like a little routine again. But then it occurred to me that an entire year went by when I didn’t have this monthly meeting and it felt so unbelievable and didn’t seem to fit into reality. When I tried to think about that gap of a year, it was almost like that year didn’t happen. I knew it did happen but since so much of the year just blurred together, it’s like it’s not marked off in my brain as a unique year. It’s like I lost an entire year. It’s just not there.
There’s probably other symptoms of the Coronamageddon Time Tunnel too. These are just the symptoms that I’ve been experiencing. When I first thought of the idea of this time tunnel that we are living in, it just seemed like a funny idea to explain how I was feeling, but now I wonder how it’s going to end. When will it end? What will it feel like when it ends? Will I continue to feel like the time spent in the tunnel didn’t really happen at all? Someday will I look back and just feel like there’s a blurry gap in my life? Will there be pre and post-Coronamageddon memories and just a gap in my memory in between? When will the days stop feeling all the same?