Ask Amy: Pandemic’s long-term effect worries reader
Dear Amy: Do people report to you that the Covid pandemic changed them?
It changed me.
I thought the isolation wouldn’t bother me because I am an introverted woman. I treasure my solitude.
There were times when I didn’t see another human being for a week or 10 days.
I went only to the store and the library just to see another human being and chat for a minute or two. That seemed to suffice – after all, for two years that person walking toward me might be carrying a disease that could kill me.
I remember thinking it’s as though I am in a spaceship that keeps circling the Earth, and I can’t land.
Well, now I have landed, and I find that I am less tolerant than I used to be, and a lot more cynical.
My compassion for others has descended to a new low.
I have dropped a couple of long-term friendships because I couldn’t bear the other person’s neediness. It was as if I was for years wearing rose-colored glasses, but they fell off and now I see the world differently.
I am active again in an art group I’ve been a member of for 17 years and I attend a music circle where we make music for each other, so it’s not that I have become totally anti-social.
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