Around this time last year, I made social plans for the first time in five months. Case numbers had gone down enough that my family felt comfortable venturing outside of our household. I traded my sweatpants for a sundress, packed extra masks and disinfectant wipes, and drove 15 minutes to meet my friend at the beach. Hours later, I returned home, sunburned and hungry but giddy to have spent time in person with her after so long.
This restrained lifestyle that we all lived for over a year now feels, miraculously, archaic. With more people getting vaccinated and pandemic restrictions loosening, we can finally make plans — for tonight, this weekend, months from now. To look forward to something in the future, after so many months of uncertainty, feels incredibly hopeful — it’s also stressing me out.
Ever since I’ve been fully vaccinated, I’ve found myself obsessed with making plans. I’ve spent hours thinking about what restaurant to go to for my birthday, whether I should fly to see a friend this summer, what to do for the Fourth of July. Being able to plan like this again is a blessing, but it’s almost as if I’ve traded my vigilance for protecting myself against the virus for an obsession with having a full calendar.
Perhaps we’re all feeling this focus on planning to a certain extent. The pandemic’s end has given us a new lease on life, and the activities that were once commonplace — walking down the street without a mask, cooking with a friend, eating at a restaurant — are newly exciting. But with this thrill comes the pressure to make the most of it and, as much as this pressure can spur us to do new things, it also can prompt us to overlook what our unplanned, everyday lives have to offer.
In many ways, this pressure to be busy isn’t new. I’ve long felt the need to schedule my time, perhaps a product of years of school where work, sports, and social time were all portioned out. After school ended, I’ve found ways to structure my days, determined to make my hours after work productive and my weekend nights social because — it seems — everyone else’s are. Being alone, and having a stretch of free time, made me feel unsettled.
But the pandemic offered justification for empty calendars and time alone. It was often depressing, but I also found it freeing in some ways — I abandoned social pressures, making the effort to do only the things I wanted and enjoying them wholeheartedly. When I did see friends, we might have gathered outdoors in random, secluded spots for brief periods of time, but in these moments, the details of the plan didn’t matter. We were always so excited to see each other, and our conversations felt more honest than usual. And when I left, I wasn’t thinking about the next time I was going to see a friend. I was just savoring that it had happened.
I’ve realized that I’ve let planning become a kind of crutch — the same way using hand sanitizer obsessively was during the pandemic. Planning comforts me that I’m social enough, working hard enough, busy enough. It promises that the future will be good. I hope the future will, but I know that even though the pandemic is nearing its end, there will still be days of boredom and loneliness and frustration. As the pandemic proved, plans are fragile, and sometimes attempting to control the future takes away from enjoying the present.
The more I read articles coaching readers through the country’s reopening, the more I wonder if the most thrilling part of the pandemic’s end is not our newfound ability to do all of our old favorite things, but rather the possibility that we still don’t know what our newfound lives will look like. If we let it, there’s room for change. I want to release myself from the self-imposed pressure to always have plans, and instead embrace spontaneity — the thing that for so many months our caution made scarce. I want to stop worrying about the future in favor of paying attention to the people with me now. As a guest on the podcast that I produce recently said, “I didn’t expect my body to actually feel so rejuvenated after seeing someone in person.”
So on my birthday, I’m abandoning reservations. My friends and I will put our names down at a restaurant with an infamously long wait, and we’ll see what happens in the hours in between. It doesn’t matter when we’re seated and, really, if we’re seated at all — this year, we’re together.
Rachael Allen is an assistant producer at Slate whose work has also appeared in the Atlantic and the Washington Post’s the Lily.
