Am I Still Locked Down?
Tags: Pandemic Diarie, Pandemic, Storytelling, Writing, Pandemic Stories

The worst was definitely yet to come.

From October 2020 until around the end of May 2021, Berlin fell into the harsh reality of a second wave hitting with unprecedented effects.

The infection rate skyrocketed and kept raising day by day for months, along with the ICU occupied bed and death rate.

This led to a steadily worsening situation followed by a series of gradually stricter and stricter lockdown measures. In the middle of a Northern European winter.

Berlin became a ghost city and a city of ghosts.

With shops closed, service providers (e.g. hairdressers, gyms, nail salons, etc.) closed, bars and restaurants closed, traveling blocked, socialization indoor and outdoor prohibited, mandatory home-office where possible, our surroundings fell into a post-apocalyptic scenario.

Thus a second (third, fourth!) wave was very much announced, we were certainly not prepared to experience the total annihilation of everyday life as we had known it.

Not only has the summer scenario of “the worst is behind us” been revealed in all its illusory nature, but we entered a phase never before seen as a European record for severity, number of contagions, deaths and restrictions.

The winter continued as a succession of increasingly severe restrictions, news of a situation that kept escalating, the ridiculous mess of vaccination campaigns’ kick-off, political debates and a continuous spiral of hopelessness, despair and isolation.

What most of us went through was a gradual loss of even the smallest sense of normalcy.

From October on, most of the sources of my personal joy, happiness and sense of aliveness were not available to me, anymore.

Not only they weren’t available, but they seemed like they would have not been available for an undefined period of time.

Thinking of the previous wave, that felt like a trial match for beginners.

Now, we were being shown the real face of the pandemic in its most traumatic nature, probably for the first time ever.

When we started to think it could be over, Covid hit us four-time harder.

And while, to some extent, the effects of the first lockdown got mitigated by the adrenaline-injecting first-time kind of experience, now we were all-in into a full, concrete realization that the pandemic was there to stay and rooting disturbingly and long-term into our reality.

Losing my sources of personal joy, happiness and sense of aliveness for a prolonged period of time changed me and the world around me.

Not being able to access routines such as having a spontaneous meal outside with my wife, meeting for a beer in a bar, strolling around the city with a friend, booking a last-minute gateway somewhere around Europe, having friends over for dinner or brunch without worrying about catching a dangerous virus (I am aware this is a set of very privileged sources of happiness, but I am not going to touch on this here) made me lose my sense of self and injected a profound sense of loss, anxiety, sadness, hopelessness and grief which completely altered my identity as I knew it before.

Something about myself faded down into the spiral of what we were experiencing and led me to a state that negatively affected my mental, emotional and physical space.