My Life during the Pandemic

I think over the last 18 months, I have went from two very different extremes, being super low to being super overwhelmed. When the pandemic first came into town, I was actually at work and my sales manager drove to my event at Rich For here in town on March 14th, pulled me and my co-workers off to the side and said that weekend was going to be the last weekend we will be there for a couple weeks. I didn’t think anything of it, because I was scheduled to be in Boston that following week. By Monday, my trip to Boston was cancelled. By the end of that week, my CNM boss who was out of town was banned from returning to campus and I was to run the show for two weeks. By the end of those two weeks, I was told to work from home. By April I was told it would be just a few more weeks of this and by the first week of May, I was fired from CNM and told by my other job that I may or may not be allowed to return. I completely lost my mind by early April and started building LEGO sets to put my energy into something. I blew through them and by Mid-May, I went through the worst depression I’ve ever experienced in my life. Both jobs I had stopped paying me and I feared my boyfriend was going to be furloughed by the government at any second. I was emotionally unstable most of the summer until I got a job at Facebook in Los Lunas. Still extremely depressed, I started going to therapy. It was working out for me; started working at Tri-Core and doing better mentally, until the holidays started coming around. I spent my first Thanksgiving of my life without my family. Then my grandpa died two days after Thanksgiving. Then I spent Christmas without my family. Lots of tears and anger ended the year. I got my first vaccine New Years Eve so I can be with my diabetic dad more. He ended up getting COVID at the end of January because he didn’t believe COVID was anything more than a cold, thankfully he didn’t get it badly but he still is feeling the effects today. I eventually got rehired here at CNM, and at my other job pre-pandemic, but I now have this sense of sensory overload when I am around large groups of people. I failed about 4 classes since the pandemic hit and I have grown to absolutely loath and resent working at home and on computers all day. I am anxious all the time and I am still working with a therapist to understand what I went through last year. Good things did end up happening these last 18 months, I adopted another dog last summer and we bought a house this past March, and most importantly, I finally took my trip to Boston for my birthday a couple weeks ago. I have never been one to be optimistic about much, and where time currently stands, I think this pandemic has only brought out the worst in human nature or made people realize that being a good person is something you have to actively choose to do each and everyday. I will continue to choose the latter, but I also have accepted my introversion much more, with wide open arms. I’m sure in 20, 50, 100 years, our kids and grand kids are going to come across millions of stories and articles just like mine to have a glimpse at what we did and felt during the pandemic. I personally don’t want to remember this weird and terrible chapter of my life. I don’t want a record of the masks and the hand sanitizer, but I’m sure looking at all the LEGO sets I built and have on my shelf will conjure up the feelings I’ve had over the last 18 months. I don’t know who will know my story, and quite frankly I don’t care. The pandemic matters. How we are surviving matters, but my day to day drudgery until we come out of the other side is not as important.