three years on

some thoughts on lockdown & collective forgetting

I took a lot of photos on the 12th of March, 2020.

A lot of videos too, enough that I can reconstruct the day surprisingly precisely for someone who rarely remembers what she had for dinner the night before. I went for a walk with two friends. We planned to live together the following year, but as we walked across University Parks and through the streets of Jericho, the bright weather with its firm evocation of spring and renewal seemed incongruous. We stumbled upon a new cafe, ordered Earl Grey and three large slices of cake, agreed to return the following term. In the background, a young woman was discussing the epidemic in China, and her struggle to get home for the vac. People aren’t taking it seriously here, she said down the phone, and I thought about the previous night, sitting in Turf Tavern, my friend playing Plague Inc on his phone and laughing at my anxieties about hand sanitiser between coughs.

At some point between our walk and that evening, he went into in isolation. I ran to Boots, Superdrug, Boots again, trying to find a thermometer. A few weeks ago, I’d had flu, and purchased one for myself. Now, when I said the word ‘fever’ it was like I’d dropped a bomb. Everyone took five steps back.

They were all out of stock, anyway.

At 8.38pm I took a video of his door. ‘I’ll have a glass of wine for you, but I’m not going to bring you one’. By 10 I was drunk in the packed college bar, watching a friend draw hearts around a mutual acquaintance from a society in one of Oxford’s art magazines. By 10.30, karaoke. We FaceTimed our isolated friend from his room. By 11.20 I’d taken a dozen bad selfies, and started recording all our conversations. I still haven’t rewatched the half hour of video footage from the night, but I know more or less what features — plans to set up a feminism society the following term, to travel in the summer, and most embarrassingly, myself and a friend chanting ‘hoe Trinity, hoe Trinity’ as we ran through second quad.

The next day I finished packing up my room, said goodbye to Oxford (waving to my friend through his window — by then there were six confirmed covid cases in Oxford, though he never tested positive), and left. When I’d gone home for Christmas vacation, the energy had been high, excited, students shouting out farewells and making plans for holiday parties, for the following term. This time, the college was eerily silent bar the sound of suitcases and boxes being loaded into cars.

I think by then we knew we weren’t coming back.

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Me on March 12 2020 looking sickly, cold, and in need of a few weeks off. Lol.

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A few weeks ago I was talking to a counsellor when she suggested gently that I might still be in ‘mental lockdown’. I’d been talking about how I felt lockdown had changed my life, in positive as well as negative ways — prompting my journey with recovery as well as the more generic experiences of connecting with family and nature, and slowing down a fast pace of life. Yet every time I referred to the impact of lockdown and the pandemic more generally, I was doing so in the strictest terms of before and after. It was like time had stopped for a moment on that night out with my friends on the 12th of March, then forked into two diverting branches, like in a sci-fi movie. Like somewhere out there was another me, one who got to live the life she was planning in those drunken vlogs. Like I wasn’t the same person at all.

I blinked and the world changed, and also we grew up.

I feel like part of me will always be stuck in March 2020, like part of me will always be nineteen, feeling like I was on the brink of discovering something elusive I would never really find. ‘I feel like something’, I’d said to my mum after my first term at uni, yet I hadn’t yet worked out what that something was by the time lockdown happened. I found and learnt other things instead, many of them wonderful and life changing, but I can’t help asking — what if? ‘What will be our generations 9/11 / Cuban Missile Crisis / outbreak of WW2?’ was a common question posed in the classrooms and online chats of my childhood, the idea of something everyone would remember exactly where they were when they heard, like the deaths of JFK and Princess Diana, the things our parents talked about. I haven’t seen people ask those questions so much, since lockdown. Everyone lived through it and each of us experienced it differently, but I think young people — recent graduates, new freshers, teens just entering their GCSE or A-Level years — felt it harshest.

We don’t yet know the effect lockdown has had on our collective and individual psyches, though a recent, eyebrow-raisingly optimistic study went viral for suggesting stay at home orders had a negligible impact on people’s mental health. Needless to say, the study didn’t take into account ‘children, young people and those with existing problems’, the social groups most likely affected, and it did not include lower income countries.¹ Nor did it acknowledge how long it can sometimes take the symptoms of trauma and mental distress to manifest, or the potential psychological and physiological impact of isolation on young children or babies born during the pandemic, like my godson, and their parents — ironically, a suggested story on the BBC’s report describes a ‘huge leap’ in children’s mental health referrals.² It, like me, made the pandemic a strict moment of before/after, yet at the same time denied any significance to that time beyond its two year parameters. Covid was over, the article unequivocally suggested, and not only was it over but it didn't really matter in the first place.

This relentless papering over of the recent past, the idea of going ‘back to normal’ rather than acknowledging the fundamentally altered nature of reality post-covid, is a privilege, as the exclusive dataset of that now-notorious study reminds us. The pandemic has been life changing, and for many people, it isn’t over; of course for those who remain immunocompromised or suffer from long covid, but also for those who are carers, whose mental health deteriorated over the pandemic, who lost family and friends. All of us lost three years of our ‘normal’ lives, our expected futures, and that will forever be a part of our identities and worldviews. I think for most people, some more than others, covid has changed our relationships to the world. While I’ve remained pro-mask in certain contexts (when sick, international or cross-country travel) I find it distressing when hardline pro-lockdown accounts on Twitter spread fear and shame, relating lengthy stories about the callousness of a world that simply wants to move on. Their distress and inability to move on from a now self-imposed isolation drives home the ongoing reality of the pandemic for all of us, even though the risk of covid is now so low.

In a way, my counsellor’s insightful diagnosis of ‘mental lockdown’ could be applied to the whole of society. We’re all still living under the shadow of the pandemic, yet no one is remembering or working through that shared trauma. Instead, we’re engaged in a process of collective amnesia which is in itself a coping mechanism as well as an institutionally-sponsored program of getting back to a normal which was never really normal in the first place. I may be wrong but I think what we were missing during lockdown wasn’t ‘normality’, but the potential that normality seemed to offer, no matter how disingenuously. The potential futures unfolding in front of us. Some of these have always been neoliberal lies about personal growth and individual achievement, but others were more powerful and positive, especially those envisioned by young people. Perhaps the most empowered and hopeful I’ve ever felt was attending the School Strikes for Climate in 2018-19, yet the news as I write this reports America’s $8b oil drilling project and the potential censorship of a new David Attenborough documentary by the BBC.

Those potential futures which were our dreams now feel more like fantasies.

I feel this deeply on a personal level; a loss of the dreams, direction, and purpose I had before and during lockdown. My sense of the future has been replaced by a general sense of dread and entrapment in an ever worsening present. Looking back on March 2020, I feel like I’m in mourning for a version of myself that never really got the chance to exist.

Whether that sense of mourning is a bad thing is a different matter. Judging by the government’s line and the attitude of much of the media, covid is over and done, part of the past rather than an ongoing present. Something best forgotten about or given a positive spin. But I don’t think that’s healthy. To know that we lost something, and to acknowledge the pain that comes with that, is an integral part of grief. Noting the positives of lockdown can be helpful, but not without an acknowledgement of its horrifying and painful aspects and their ongoing impact on our lives. Online this week, people have been sharing photos of themselves three years ago, at the start of the pandemic, or reflecting on their distressed and sometimes absurd actions, from hoarding loo roll to wearing Halloween masks for safety in public. Its easy to depict these images as farcical, but in the moment they reflected a real terror and intense confusion that gripped us, for very good reason — on the whole, the pandemic was not a lighthearted matter. During lockdown, I watched my dad attend a Zoom funeral and then go back to working from home at the same desk he’d so briefly mourned at, an all too familiar experience and one which suggests the difficulties of processing personal traumas at a time of such intense social trauma. Taking time to mourn the victims of the pandemic and our own altered lives would help us work through the experience better than any collective forgetting or revisionism.

Back in 2020, WHO warned that covid ‘amnesia’ would create the conditions for another pandemic, describing it as a common but worrisome response to a global ‘traumatic event’.³ A 2021 study referred to global amnesia as the ‘biggest threat to the health, well-being, and persistence of humanity’.⁴ The study argued that humanity exhibits an ongoing pattern of forgetting our biggest threats, leading us to discount predictions of doom without personal experience (as in the case of climate change), to normalise serious threats, and to suffer ‘warning fatigue’ about threats seemingly out of our control. Thus, resilience to threat is reduced and the risk of further catastrophes heightened. The concern is salient but I also think covid amnesia has a more diffuse impact on individuals and communities, tied to our inability to acknowledge and reckon with the painful recent past. We’re already seeing amnesia’s effects: a moment of silence for a dead monarch but none for the thousands of victims of the pandemic, the doctors and nurses we clapped as heroes demonised for striking, the Tory assault on an arts industry which provided much-needed hope throughout lockdown. As these examples suggest, covid amnesia is not just spontaneous, but state-sponsored, the idea of returning to normality a return to toxic capitalist work practices and an excuse for further state-intervention in our lives, as in the case of new protest restrictions dreamt up during lockdown. And I have to wonder if collective forgetting is also involving a strange kind of collective forgiving; Matt Hancock seemed a lot funnier on I'm A Celebrity than he did directing a disastrous pandemic health policy.

I think it would be fair to say that covid amnesia has also wiped out much of our awareness of the risks of climate change, which humanity was finally wakening up to pre-2020. Carbon emissions increased to a new peak in 2022 following the covid crisis, a jarring indictment of global pledges to ‘build back better’.⁵ Whilst Liz Truss’s fracking debacle never reached fruition, many steps backwards to fossil fuels are going unchallenged in the public sphere. My sense is that ‘warning fatigue’ about covid has joined hands with climate pessimism; people are simply exhausted and yet unable to move on and start re-building a better future, due to the lack of a collective public reckoning.

Re-writing or erasing the pandemic from our collective consciousness won’t make its effects go away,. It won’t take away the trauma caused by covid, or help us work through that trauma on an individual and collective basis. Society has been ruptured by the pandemic. Without acknowledging that, we can’t move beyond the idea of a ‘return to normality’ and towards a better, more hopeful world. Or to put it plainly: you can’t get out of a mental lockdown if you don’t know you’re in it.

1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-64890952

2. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-60197150

3. https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-who-origins-idINKBN28A2IG

4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8591573/

5. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/12/05/carbon-emissions-peak-record-2022/