At the time it stripped away all my routines and social contact and sent me into a depression. After the insecurity and uncertainty of lockdowns, and tiers and events being cancelled, it's taken time to be able anticipate events and really find the joy again. I was either emotionally flat or sheer angry until late 2021. Winter 2020/21 was the breaking point when I went into a flat existance mode.
Most of my friends have been emotionally stretched since 2020, and when everyone's drowning in life shit at the same time, there's no energy left to lift each other up. It's taken 3+ years to heal enough to rebuild, and begin to pull together to create some light. It's not all been Covid related, but at least 18m of that meant we've all been drained before we've dealt with the rest of life shit like bereavements, health issues, relationships and work. The lockdowns started when I was still processing DS1's autism diagnosis. A year of prolonged school closures, no social structure from extra-curruculars and being prohibited from social contact beyond the family
was not a healthy template for life for DS1. A lot of people went beyond the law and it took a lot of confidence in someone's nature to be able to suggest meeting without being branded a "granny-killer"
I've lost older family. MiL died of non-Covid issues last year, but it's now just turned 4 years since visited her as a family because of the restrictions of international travel and care homes. By her last months she was so frail, and forgetting family, it had reached the stage where it was better to leave the DCs with their memories of her as she had been rather than her forgetting who they were and not recognising them at 2.5 years older when she was already forgetting her own children.
DM is still going, but restrictions stole away a lot of her social confidence. The prolonged fear mongering meant that she has totally disconnected from interest in my family. Bubbles pushed her to local DB while leaving it illegal for me to travel to visit her for 9 months out of 12 in 20/21. Our relationship has not recovered. People in their mid-80s don't bounce back like that a couple of years later. Her world shrank massively overnight and has remained in that state.
It's not all been Covid related, but the measures were cruel in their own right and have caused their own issues as well as making wider issues harder to deal with (still sorting out the toll on DS2's education as his learning difficulties caused a greater impact and haven't been recognised coz Covid). Last year's catalogue of bereavements would have happened anyway, but getting though them would have been easier if there had been some light relief in the previous two years. Previously when in dark times, there were always alternative patches of light where you could have a rest from the difficulties and forget for a while before ploughing on.
I'm a harder person now, because when the chips are down, there are very few people who will actually care enough look out for me. I don't have the energy to give freely into bottomless pits, and there's enough life issues going on anyway.
Life has changed since 2020. It's not possible to disentangle exactly how all those strands interact but having normality and coping mechanisms taken for so long is taking a long time to heal from and life won't look like 2019 again. I hope I can re-find some of that lost energy again because I prefered that previous, less cynical version of me and I can't magically create all the solutions that will replenish the soul.