After a year in semi-isolation, Pretty Slow’s Alessia Armenise reflects on what the global pandemic taught us about ourselves and our desires.
We are now one year deep in a global pandemic that was supposed to last a couple of months. I think you can easily ask anyone around you – or at least anyone without a scientific mind – and I am sure we would all agree that when we went into our first lockdown in March 2020, we really thought that would be it. That we would endure staying at home, not seeing our loved ones and live off take away and bad Netflix shows for a couple of months, but that we would have been out of this nightmare come summer 2020.
A year later and here we are, on our third lockdown and looking at a light at the end of the tunnel that still seems way too far away. Surely though, this year wasn’t all bad. There are things that we only learn when we find ourselves in a difficult situation, and Coronavirus definitely managed to push all our buttons and forced us to give ourselves a long hard stare in the mirror, and come to terms with ourselves, our life and what we want from it.
If I have to be honest – apart from the fact that I managed to break my toe – I didn’t suffer too badly during first lockdown. Finally, I could get a break from public transport, I could be home in the evenings instead of stumbling back at 10 pm or later after a day of work and (even worse) networking, longing for the weekend that seemed to only last for ten minutes. I had time to make my own meals, to do some yoga (until the toe brake) and to just chill for a bit which is something that, thanks to our society, we never really have the time to do. It was weird, but it was strangely good.
The pandemic taught us to give more value to things. It pushed us to get stuff done instead of waiting around for the perfect moment because it showed us that life doesn’t wait.
Alice Gris, Pretty Slow’s Italian editor
Being locked up made me realise it wasn’t normal that I tried to escape the city every time I could. At some point, I even stopped unpacking my weekend bag because I was making it every week anyway. London wasn’t doing it for me as it wasn’t for my husband, so why did we keep on ignoring the signals for three years, convincing ourselves that we had to spend a couple more years in London?
There aren’t many things that we have to do, it’s usually more what we think we have to do. We packed our bags in our London flat one last time and we moved back to where we came from three years prior, Paris. And it’s crazy how your mood changes when you are where you actually want to be. Talking to a few people, I know it wasn’t just me that was feeling a new sense of decisiveness. Pretty Slow’s Italian editor, Alice Gris, told me that she thinks that Coronavirus taught us that life doesn’t wait for us to make decisions – and I think she completely nailed my sentiment with this sentence.
Would we have made the decision if it wasn’t for the pandemic? Probably yes, but we wouldn’t have done it without some safe, elaborate plan and definitely not as quickly. But when you are in the middle of a global crisis, you feel that the situation justifies the fact that you don’t have a plan. In a weird and ironic turn of events, Coronavirus took our freedom away, but it gave us the freedom to make mistakes, take time for ourselves, stop doing things we hated and talk to people that were hurting us because it gave us the virtual shield of a problem bigger than us to justify ourselves.
So many people have started businesses, have left toxic relationships, decided to move abroad or to go back home because they finally had the time to notice their feelings. So, even if we wouldn’t do it again and hopefully we won’t have to, let’s hope that we can remember what it was like to feel like other people’s opinions don’t matter and just embrace the very liberating concept of living your best life.
Picture: Cottonbro
