Leaving Your Pandemic Self Behind (or Not)

With a burst of energy, many people are emerging from socially distant lives that felt, at times, like cocoons. It remains to be seen how the past 16 months have affected how people see themselves. While we might expect that something as dramatic as the pandemic might trigger massive changes, in fact, there are good reasons to expect that people will return to only slightly altered versions of their 2019 selves.

The concept of multiple selves

People have what social psychologists call "multiple selves." That is, how people define themselves may differ depending on the situation. Think about it this way: If you were asked to use 20 words to describe yourself at work and then 20 words to describe yourself when out with friends, those words might be different or might come in a different order. At work, you might start defining yourself in terms of certain skills or work-related traits, like organized and punctual. With friends, you might start defining yourself in terms of other traits, like caring and loyal. This is because we have a work-self and social-self, and people vary in the degree to which their work-self and social-self overlap.

Current vs. past selves

People have past, present, and future selves, which can be very different or very similar. A lot of things can make people feel distant or different from a past self. An obvious one is relative time. Our high school selves feel further away than our college selves. The more distant the self, the more abstract and less detailed are our recollections and views of the self. For example, when high school and college reunion attendees look back at photos from high school or college, they may not remember what it felt like to be that younger version of themselves but they can recall the attitudes and goals of that person.

In addition to time, big changes like the shift to home-based life during the pandemic can create a distance between current and past selves. Rather than a gentle off-ramp from a superhighway to a slow country road, people were yanked from an established lifestyle into an entirely new one. While we might have expected that the transition back to the superhighway might have been slow and steady, with states reopening, many are feeling that once again they have been yanked out of an established lifestyle and dropped into the fast lane. This lack of transition (in both directions) creates psychological distance between the current and past selves and can leave people not knowing who they are. Are they their 2019 self? Their 2020 self?

Rituals to mark the passage between current and past selves

To the degree that today's less-restricted lifestyles feel more like 2019 and less like 2020, people may feel distant from who they were last month. And, it can be disconcerting to shed a past self so quickly. To make the shift more comfortable, and to retain what we learned about ourselves in 2020, we can create rituals to celebrate the big reopening. Like graduations, weddings, or other coming-of-age ceremonies, a post-pandemic ritual can mark the change, put the past self into perspective, and create space to reflect on that past self.

The ritual you create can be alone or with others. This article by Elizabeth Chamberlain provides more detail, but essentially, your ritual needs to include a clear intention and time for reflection. For me, it meant washing the basket of homemade masks and reflecting on where we got them (my mother-in-law made them for us), how we had seasonal ones for the holidays, and how it had become a regular chore to search for them in the cars and all over the house, wash them, and then return them to the basket by the door. After this reflection, I put masks into the closet until I decide what to do with them next or find a place to recycle.

When you create a ritual to mark the passage between current and past selves, you create a way to reflect on that past self (including forgiving and praising that past self), and a way to move forward. This will make the shift more intentional and controlled, and create a connection between who you are now and who you were one month or nine months ago.