How Do We Act Now Things Are Going "Back to Normal"?

263 days. That's how long Melbournians have spent under harsh stay at home orders and doesn't include the days in between where we had limiting restrictions. No one could have predicted how this pandemic would change the world, but if you told me at the beginning that we would be subject to not one, not two, but SIX hard lockdowns, I would have thought you were crazy.

The harsh lockdown orders include:

- Only leaving the house for 4 reasons: shopping for essentials, working if you were an essential worker, caregiving and exercising for one hour a day

- Masks were mandatory everywhere - including outdoors

- A 5-kilometre radius you had to abide by

- A 9pm-5am curfew

- Everything closed except the essentials like supermarkets and pharmacies

Of course, like evereyone else, I threw myself into starting a new hobby when I was stood down from my job and had time to fill. Mine was crochet, which I taught myself to do à la YouTube.

Between each lockdown, we'd get a small taste of freedom and the feeling of getting our lives back to some sort of normal, before new cases shut down the state once again. Every lockdown got harder and harder as the never-ending cycle continued. Homeschooling, working from home, one hour of exercise, home before curfew - it was like a prison.

Until earlier this week when the Premier announced that lockdown would officially be ending on Friday and things were slowly starting to open up again, including restaurants, pubs and cafés. Immediately, my friends started calling around and making plans, who's catching up with who and when, can we find a place that's not booked out on the weekend etc.

Now, I'm a very social person and have quite a few different friend groups, but all of a sudden I was struck with a whole lot of anxiety (ok, not all of a sudden considering I do struggle with panic disorder!) The thought of trying to see a whole lot of people when the only people I've seen for the good part of two years has been my family and my partner was slightly terrifying. We've been allowed to meet a couple of friends outdoors for a picnic in the past few weeks which I've done a couple of times, but I'm just left feeling exhausted after only a few hours of socialising.

Lockdown has created fatigue within so many of us, as well as a lot of social anxiety, as many of us have 'forgotten' how to act out in public. It's like a habit - if you don't practice it enough it gets forgotten or replaced with a bad habit. Mandatory vaccines have created rifts within friend groups around who's vaxxed and who isn't and anxiety to go back to the office and wear something other than trackies (and actually put on a bra!) is confronting.

How can we go from being forced to be hermits back to our normal social lives? While many of my friends are dying to get out and interact, the sudden influx of invitations places has put me on edge as I grapple with going out into the big wide world again. Don't get me wrong, I'm STOKED that we're finally being let out, but you'll have to excuse us for being a bit apprehensive - we've been let out 5 times and plunged into 6 lockdowns - the last 'snap 7-day lockdown' has lasted 3 months.

Although we've been promised that was our last lockdown ever, there's a strange sense of unease and urgency around. Half of us have been so deprived we're making dinner reservations at 9 pm just so we can see people and experience being in a restaurant again, while the other half are like me, anxious at the thought of swells of people around. Living on the beach in a tourist hotspot certainly doesn't help, as people flock to my part of town when the weather's nice.

So the question is, what will life really be like now that we've essentially been let out of jail? How are we going to adjust back into our normal lives when the best part of the last two years have been spent living in uncertainty, baking banana bread and homeschooling the kids? Will this create long-term mental scars in people who never had mental health issues to begin with? There are so many unknowns, and unfortunately, nothing to go off. The last pandemic was in such a different time than we're living in now that it's almost impossible to compare the two.

As freedom day Friday (which is what it's being called here) approaches, we'll begin to see the new world we're living in, as well as the costs to our wellbeing, economy and society as a whole, that have come with the title of the most locked-down city in the world.