It was the first midnight of May, and the smell of weed and alcohol wafted through the crowd. The band onstage was screaming something about resilience and love, and I stood on the outskirts, feeling my breath warm the skin under my mask. Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont had just declared that masked outdoor gatherings were fine—especially when the whole audience was vaccinated. Sober, I watched my college peers dance and slip off their masks to share cigarettes and drinks. It should’ve been the most happy, hopeful sight I’d seen in a year. It was not.

From my vantage point at the edge of the concert, all I could think of was the emergency department of the hospital where I’d been a month earlier for long-term COVID-19 complications. As my friends spun amidst the strobe lights, I felt the fluorescent heat of overhead lights in the crowded waiting room. The crowd cheered the band, and I was transported back in time. I heard patients screaming for relief at three in the morning from makeshift hospital beds set up in the hallways. Crumpled beer cans on the dewy grass reminded me of the patient wheeled into the hospital just after me, who had overdosed on opioids. Opioid overdoses skyrocketed during the pandemic, leading people like that man to the hospital, with his oxygen level wavering at 90. And here we were: privileged college students, drinking, smoking, and snorting for fun.

My friend turned to me. “Your pupils are huge,” she said, her voice thick with marijuana. I panicked. If my pupils were big, maybe the swelling the doctors found behind my eyes had gotten worse—the post-COVID-19 papilledema that made my vision blurry. Fear washed over me: I would have to go back to the hospital, my parents would have to drive down, I’d be poked and prodded and I’d hear the screams of other patients and it would never end. The sickness would keep coming back and back and back. 

Of course, my pupils were just big because it was dark out. Everyone else’s was like that, too, and my friend was just high. But even intoxicated, she was right that something was wrong with my eyes. I was seeing the party in a different way than the people around me. 

I call it the COVID-19 emotional long haul. It isn’t depression or even anxiety. I think it’s just trauma. 

I know other people feel this way, too—those who lost someone they loved, worked as an essential worker in a stressful public place or feared leaving their house. These past two years happened to all of us. They were stressful, painful, and scarring. The damage is irreversible, and there’s no handbook on how to heal from collective trauma, grief, stress, or even from COVID-19 itself. 

It’s eerie to see streets that once looked like ghost towns now full of traffic and people. Hanging out with my friends often feels selfish, and going out on the weekend feels scary. Isolation is still the default for many of us; it’s lonely, but it’s safe. 

Fear doesn’t leave just because the immediate threat does, especially after a long exposure period. The body becomes used to feeling afraid, it knows that anxiety protects you from getting ill. It makes you cautious. People spent months pumping heaps of cortisol through their bodies, so backing away from this behavior after such an extended period feels wrong.

Although the actual Coronavirus germ is long gone from my body, I can still feel the damage it caused inside of me. In moments of brain fog or chest pain, it whispers, “I’m still here.” My doctor explained to me that COVID-19 lights a fire in your body, fills it with smoke, and then hits the road. It’s an invisible arsonist, leaving you in ashes and ruins you can experience but can’t see. 

We lived through a worldwide fire—it was traumatic. It still is. Sure, the concert crowds look normal, but they feel wrong to many of us. We are all dealing with our own emotional COVID-19-long haul, each healing in our own way and time from unique experiences. It doesn’t matter if your optic nerves are swollen: seeing the world in a different way after living through a pandemic makes perfect sense.

When I left that concert on the first midnight of May, I tucked myself into bed and called my mom. I told her I was going to be sick forever, and that my illness had rendered me forever incapable of having fun. The phantom illness and the scenes that came with it followed me everywhere. Would I ever be myself again?

“You will,” my mom told me through the phone. “You will.”

And she was right. 

I wish I could time travel and tell the May 2021 version of myself that I’d be okay. I can see clearly now, both in a physical and metaphorical sense. The emergency room doesn’t haunt me anymore. It did get better. Healing is a lengthy and nonlinear process, and I am still not done. But I now know how to manage the symptoms that linger and I’m learning to manage the trauma that comes with an aggressive chronic illness. Some things will never heal: COVID-19 set off health issues that I will spend the rest of my life dealing with. I can’t control how the virus physically impacts me, but I can control what I take away from my own experience. I’ve learned a lot.

Like everyone else, I’m still fighting the fire, clearing the ash and rubble until I see the grass start to grow again. I’m doing the work with a sense of mindfulness and appreciation for my own emotions that I didn’t have before. It’s okay to be afraid, lonely, and apprehensive as the pandemic ever so slowly subsides; feeling happy and hopeful all the time, or even at all, is not realistic. You don’t just bounce back, not after this. 

Halle Newman can be reached at hnewman@wesleyan.edu.