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The idea of life after quarantine has me thinking a lot about what it means to truly be free. In 1973 bank robbers held four hostages captive for nearly a week inside one of Stockholm’s largest banks. When the hostages were released six days later, they defended their captors, refusing to testify against them and even raising money for their legal defense.
It was as if they weren’t ready to be truly free from the force that once bound them. Or they didn’t know how. Or their brains somehow changed irrevocably during their protracted ordeal.
You might recognize this story as the psychological phenomenon that inspired the term Stockholm syndrome. Though not an official diagnosis, it describes the mental state of someone who, though now liberated, is still connected to a captor through an unflagging loyalty to a plan formed as a way of trying to stay alive.
A year into an excruciating ordeal, I too feel bound too closely to my adaptive mindset to change it.
I might be forcing the comparison a smidge: The pandemic held none of us at gunpoint, but it did threaten our lives and keep us captive in its own way. As someone who was able to work at home while homeschooling my children and distracting myself with virtual frivolities, I am aware of the life-protecting facets of my privilege even within my own city of Los Angeles, which was for a time the world epicenter of the disease.
But even those of us who could completely retreat into hiding have faced our own traumas. And as we emerge from it, I know I’m not alone in feeling nervous about the transition. We’re deeply conditioned by now, and trying to undo a year’s worth of internalized patterns sounds scary as hell.
When the pandemic slammed into our lives in March 2020, it hijacked our daily routines and replaced them with sanitizer-drenched workarounds. We endured agonizing days of fear and grief which evolved over time from feeling like we’re living in an alternate universe to accepting our new normal.
And now, at last, there’s a light at the end of this thing: The transmission curve is heading sharply down, while the vaccination curve is accelerating ever up. President Biden promised enough doses for every adult American by the end of May, meaning that herd immunity could be a reality before my mid-summer birthday.
But I’m not sure I’m ready to be free. Maybe it’s that I just don’t know how anymore. My brain done broke-o. My going-out muscles atrophied. Outside clothes seem conceptually superfluous. The very notion of having to get myself presentable below desk level makes me feel awkward and out of touch. The idea of making small talk is laughable. I can’t remember how it all used to go in the before times, and frankly it seems like a lot of work.
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Sensing the universality of this feeling, I posed it as a question to my social networks: What’s something you used to love to do that you just can’t imagine doing again?
Attending big weddings: “Now I would look for an open window or door for ventilation. It will feel odd to be in a room with so many people, and my instinct would be to seek out maximum airflow.”
Hanging out at music festivals: “I think of being in a huge crowd and using a portapotty in that setting now, and it makes me shudder.”
Singing in the choir: “It’s so good for humanity, in the way that it gives our oldest citizens a sense of community and a sense of relevance. But how can we breathe all over our elders after this?”
Shaking hands.
Blowing out birthday candles.
Eating the cake whose candles you just blew out.
Sushi buffets.
Vegas trips.
Kids’ parties with ball pits.
Indoor spin classes.
Bars.
And the list of hard passes isn’t limited to those who have managed to avoid the virus for a year. COVID survivor Melissa Savage, a former 911 operator with the LAPD, says gyms, facials, and movie theaters all feel like nonstarters going forward.
“I have natural antibodies and I’m fully vaccinated, so I’m as bulletproof as you can get with this thing,” she says. “But the idea of being in an enclosed space with strangers or having someone near my unmasked face makes me feel panicked.”
When she found out she’d been exposed last summer, she says, “Something triggered in my brain,” which caused spiraling anxiety that didn’t abate. “The constant tracing of where I’d been and what I had touched and who I had been around didn’t stop after we recovered—if anything, it got worse,” she said. “I kind of had survivor’s guilt, and I actually ended up getting medical help because my anxiety was through the roof.”
As my informal poll indicates, it’s clear that, even when statistics support changing behaviors and loosening restrictions, it’s going to take some substantial rewiring to move through all the entrenched hyper-vigilance so many of us have gotten so used to in a post-pandemic world.
During brief periods of relatively lower COVID transmission numbers, I toyed with doing a few nonnecessary things: eating on a restaurant’s patio, staying at a local hotel overnight for my role as a travel writer. But in Los Angeles, where I live, the third spike was so ghastly and unrelenting that I shut down almost all daily activity outside the house.
And honestly, it made things pretty simple: I didn’t go anywhere, so I didn’t have to evaluate daily decisions about risk. And there’s been comfort in knowing what’s expected of me. No deviation, no gray area, no thinking required.
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After a point, we didn’t even visit outdoors with my kids’ four local grandparents; that way, we’d have no chance of infecting them—and I liked those odds. By now all our older loved ones are fully vaccinated. But I still cringe when I think of my six-year-old twins hugging their grandparents, even if the CDC says it’s okay. It just seems…wrong.
For anyone rolling their eyes at the idea of being nervous to return to normal after more than a full year indoors, consider this: “Underlying fear of the unknown is ingrained within our DNA,” says psychiatrist Jennifer Love, coauthor of the new book When Crisis Strikes: 5 Steps to Heal Your Brain, Body, and Life from Chronic Stress, who explains that it stems from back in the day when we lived in caves and had to watch out for predators. “As humans, we’ve evolved to live in cities and all that, but our wiring for alarm hasn’t changed.”
Love says it’s not surprising that each reentry decision following this period of utterly binary thinking could induce a new feelings of uncertainty or anxiety. “It’s going to be a lot of stress management,” she says.
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Even after we’re cleared to move as freely as we please, it’s hard to imagine ever returning to a time of carefree comfort outside my home—the bustle of an international departures terminal, the energy of a music festival crowd. But even if it seems that this hesitant mindset will last forever, there’s historical precedent that suggests it won’t.
Love points to scientific research that demonstrates just how innate our need is for human contact. “Primates who are deprived of social interaction and then brought back together do go back to how things were,” she says.
And consider that incidences of actual Stockholm syndrome are actually pretty rare throughout history. “Most people are resilient,” Love says. “They may try to align for a time as a survival mechanism, but when they’re let free, they’re like, ‘I’m out of here.’”
Alesandra Dubin is a Los Angeles–based lifestyle writer.
