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What I Lost During the Pandemic
And How I’m Learning the Importance of Forgiveness
For the past year and a half, life, as we all once knew it, changed irrevocably. This much, I think, we can all agree on. There is, as someone recently said to me a “palpable” feeling in the air — of relief — of a sense of a hopeful return to a pre-pandemic state of life and I too, also feel this — but along with this, I am also feeling a sense of “reckoning” as well — coming to terms with everything.
I think during the pandemic, I was in a “fight or flight” response meaning: just trying to my utmost best to quite literally “survive” — to not get sick, to keep myself safe, and the almost near constant worry that those I loved and cared about would not get sick, either. It was strangely enough, a bit like Rip Van Winkle, I suppose, going to sleep one night, with the world one way, and then seemingly awakening the next day to a completely different world: it felt internally, on the inside, in my heart and mind, that someone somewhere had taken a giant snow globe and vigorously shaken it up and down so that when everything finally landed, it was all upside down and the wrong way up.
For me to write about my own personal losses during the pandemic seems very minor compared to the truly tragic and…
