COVID – 19 has been a hotly debated topic for the last three four years and we can’t deny that life got pretty gloomy because of it; all we could see around us and hear about was a terribly aggressive pandemic that suddenly hit the world and left no country behind. We thought we knew everything about it, about its symptoms, vaccines, manifestations since the beginning, almost like expert virologists. Little had we known, it would’ve changed our lives inconceivably. For instance, sometimes we tend to forget about the time that kept on passing by while we were locked up in our homes, waiting for another quarantine report to be announced on the news.

What’s left of the virus
Now that the pandemic has finally run its course, we’re seeing its long-term effects on our lives. We could consider the COVID-19 era over, but what will definitely never leave us is the psychological adjustment it forced us to face. Dealing with mental health might seem shallow, but it actually shoul be prioritized, especially in an extreme situation, since our own mind is a really powerful weapon. The more out of control life circumstances are, the more stressed we feel about what is going on around us; consequently, the more vulnerable we get to using maladaptive ways of coping.

Luckily, we’re no more counting the bodies the pandemic used to leave behind daily, we’re not missing someone’s touch nor being afraid to break a curfew. But what the virus has aggressively taught us with its unorthodox methods is how to cope with pain and, at the same time, how to cherish life. We’re now able to live day by day knowing that things could be much worse; so, we value what we have and maybe we even try to respect it.

Are we back to ordinary life?
Normality is a word that we use fairly often, even though it doesn’t have a solid meaning. As human beings, we live and evolve in the process, creating a new version of ourselves bit by bit, decision by decision. Anyway, when people started to notice the global effects of COVID-19, they defined a “pre-pandemic” and a “post-pandemic” era, realizing how much the world has indeed changed.

In conclusion, stating that we’ve successfully returned to the pre-pandemic era is a blind objection to the fact that people have died, others have lost their jobs and many have fallen into depression. All that we can do is mourn, stand up and fight, not in the name of “normality”, but hoping that our endeavors will grant us a safer future.