At the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, Stanford University psychology professor Jamil Zaki described the experience of living through the spread of Covid-19 as “the largest collective trauma that anyone alive has experienced”. In a Twitter thread designed to reassure readers that their tough emotions were perfectly normal, he said the primary feeling we were dealing with together was grief – “grief over what we’ve lost, vulnerability about what we can so easily lose, and a lack of control”.
Almost two years later, after battling through endless lockdowns and month after month of social restrictions, we are emerging from the pandemic. The grief and anxiety may have passed, but they have been replaced with another sensation: numbness.
