How many emails did you write this year that ended with “stay safe”? Or began with, “I hope you are well.” Every one of mine.

To be clear, I am one of the fortunate. I did not lose any of my family members or friends to Covid-19. I did not lose my business. I did not suffer from depression. Or did I?

I came through the month of March, 2021, feeling like I’d made it! Vaccines complete, my children and grandchildren prospering, my life relatively productive writing, making art. Seems as if I’ve had the best possible outcome. So what’s the problem?

On April 1, columnist David Brooks, in an editorial in the New York Times entitled, How Covid Can Change Your Personality, wrote, “I’d say the most underappreciated effect has been the accumulation of absences — the joys we missed rather than the blows we received.”

I know I am somewhat disoriented from the lack of human contact. The gentle ‘hello’s’ and cups of coffee with a neighbor are memories. The connective tissue has disappeared. Some of us are depressed. Some have lost their ability to socialize. It’s been all business for a year just to stay safe, to manage getting groceries, zoom into work, Facebook with family, and take care of the kids without getting too angry.

As winter wore on this year, I had many strange dreams of anxiety – can’t get there, can’t get everyone together, trying to find the airport, the train station, or finding myself all alone in a bewildering situation. I woke up at all hours. I suffered from jaw clenching at night, and headaches by day. I lost a tooth. I started a meditation practice. I did yoga.

Have we all been traumatized? Trauma is defined as either acute or complex. Symptoms include confusion, anxiety, inability to have a restful sleep, inability to focus on work, among others. A new trauma brings up former trauma – and it doesn’t have to be life-shattering. Rather it might be the time you felt so all alone that being alone in the world was simply more than you could manage.

But you managed then. And you’re managing now. Still, suffering persists and you don’t really want to manage anymore.

My last vivid dream, a few weeks ago:  I am in Israel, surrounded by family members, and members of my former husband’s family. An unknown man, but somehow related to me through marriage, is surrounded by family and in-laws. We are all instructed to step back, step back. I suddenly notice a strange object, almost transparent, in the sky. Suddenly there are many, and I recognize them as drones. We are signaled to step back further and further until I realize that the drones are coming for this man. He is about to be shot.  At the point of his death, I wake up terrified.

In Fritz Perls’ Gestalt Therapy dream interpretation, I know that I am everyone and everything in that dream. I am the in-laws, the drones, and the one being targeted. I am to be eliminated by drones. The droning on of the year. Is this not trauma?

My meditation practice calls for empathy and compassion. And so I practice. Empathy for the world working through this existential crisis of our species, and compassion for those on the front lines helping the sick, for those battling the purveyors of stupidity in our political life. Empathy for all the young parents with young children managing the stress of work and child rearing without adequate services. I have so much empathy, remembering how it was to raise young children – sans pandemic. My compassion hurts.

I have compassion for those I know who have lost parents, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, and friends to this virus. Empathy for the ones I know who are in nursing homes or hospitals, unable to have loved ones sit by their sides. Is this not trauma?

“Pandemic year feels like a parenthesis in our life narratives,” says Brooks. When can we close the parenthesis?

It is April. The light starts earlier and stays later, the temperature rises, daffodils poke through soil.  Birds sing in the morning, ducks waddle into the wet areas of my property. A pair of bluebirds is flitting about. I am trying to be excited, walking miles every day to fire up the happy neurons. I know I am okay, but at what cost?

I hope you are well.