letting a little joy back into our lives

my dog enjoying the perks of suburbs, like “backyards”

I’m writing this from my parents’ house in the Chicago suburbs; yesterday, my husband and I drove 12 hours from Brooklyn to Illinois to visit them. It’s my first time seeing them since before the pandemic. We had originally hoped to go at Thanksgiving — we had planned to drive, quarantine beforehand, get tested before and after, take every precaution we could — but in the end, cases were rising at an alarming rate and public health experts were telling everyone not to travel. So we stayed in New York instead.

It felt like we finally could visit safely: my parents and I are both fully vaccinated, my husband is half vaccinated, and we were still driving instead of flying, still wearing masks any time we were in public. We had postponed seeing our families for long enough.

I’m not alone. As access to the vaccines widens, more people I know have been seeing friends, dining indoors at restaurants, taking trips. After a year of having all those things taken away from us, who wouldn’t want to resume some of their favorite activities again once you’re vaccinated?

But it feels almost unnerving to be allowed to do things again. The things we’re tentatively starting to do now were not allowed for so long. (I mean technically, of course, you could do anything you wanted, but everyone from Dr. Fauci and public health experts to social media vigilantes warned against them.)

I’ve started seeing other vaccinated friends for indoor gatherings — I had two (also fully vaxxed) friends over for dinner last week, and while it felt thrilling to casually have friends over for dinner again, I couldn’t shake a tiny feeling of residual guilt too, that nagging voice in the back of my head saying you’re not supposed to be doing this.

We should, of course, stay vigilant if you’re not fully vaccinated yet; we’re so close to the end, and we should do everything we can to prevent an increase in cases when it’s almost, almost over. But lately I’ve also noticed a new wave of admonitions to practice extreme caution even if you’re fully vaccinated and past your two-week waiting period, and continued judgment of those who are, post-vax, beginning to dabble in normal activities again.

Pandemic shaming has been present since the beginning of this whole thing over a year ago; it has continued and taken new forms as the pandemic dragged on and on and on. There was shaming of people who got the vaccine before others; now there is shaming of people who are starting to enjoy simple pre-pandemic activities after being vaccinated—the small luxuries we used to take for granted, like having a drink inside a restaurant, having a friend over, traveling anywhere.

It makes sense that exercising caution has become an ingrained behavior in all of us: we’ve spent the past year practicing caution by default. We stayed indoors and limited non-essential trips outside. We avoided planes and trains and public transportation if we could. We avoided seeing friends and family. We cancelled weddings and proms and graduations. We masked and then we double-masked. Even when some cities began to reopen things, we accepted that just because we could didn’t mean we should. We always erred on the side of caution.

After a year of the default being don’t do that, being told that we ARE allowed to do some things is supposed to be joyful — and it is! — but it’s also a little confusing for our brains. It turns out after a year of this, returning to “normal” isn’t instantaneously easy. It requires us to unlearn some of the new habits we’ve developed. We’ve spent a year training ourselves to accept that sucking all the joy out of our lives was the necessary cost of fighting the virus; now, it seems hard to untrain our brains from the belief that life has to be miserable in order to be safe.

Now, if you’re vaccinated, the CDC says you can actually do some things again without posing a risk to yourself or others. You can can gather indoors with other vaccinated people without masks. You can travel domestically and internationally without needing to quarantine. And yet still I’ve heard and seen many people saying that even with the vaccine, they will still only see friends outdoors and double-masked; they wouldn’t dare dream of anything more.

Of course, everyone has different comfort levels, and what you want to do post-vaccine is a personal choice, but judgment of others’ post-vaccine life choices feels unnecessary, and exhausting. This past year, we were cooped up indoors with nothing to do, so we channeled our energy into picking fights and shaming others on social media. I think it’s time to instead channel that energy into enjoying the things we’re now allowed to start doing again.

Of course we should still keep masking in public and avoiding crowds, but once you’re vaccinated, it’s okay to maybe let our pandemic guards down just a tiny bit now. The past year has worn us down so much; it’s okay to allow ourselves to have a little fun again!* We’re allowed to bring a little joy back into our lives!* That’s the whole point of a vaccine: to allow us to finally bring this long, weird, purgatory year to an end.

So go get your shot and then enjoy going back to your favorite restaurant.*

*If you’re fully vaccinated and two weeks past your second dose, of course!!

Good things to read

America ruined my name for me, The New Yorker. This was so, so, good, and any person of color growing up in America with an ethnic name will find it familiar.

The pandemic’s wrongest man, The Atlantic.

The therapy-app fantasy, The Cut.

Catching up with NYC’s vaccine daddy, The Cut. A very deserving profile of Huge Ma, the man behind TurboVax.

The lives of others, Atavist. A truly stunning piece of longform, investigative journalism that starts with a woman in Newfoundland thinking her coworker sure looks a lot like her brother-in-law, and turns out to be something much deeper and more sinister.

The mysterious case of F*cking Good Pizza, Vice. A fascinating deep dive into those mysterious restaurants that only exist on delivery apps.

The strange journey of ‘cancel,’ from Black-culture punchline to white grievance watch word, Washington Post.

Dude, where’s my couch?, The New Yorker. A delightful little New York story.

The quiet horrors of Cally Gingrich, Trashberg. The deep dive into Callista Gingrich’s Instagram that you didn’t know you needed.

We have all hit a wall, New York Times. Even Susan Orlean isn’t writing anything right now.

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