By John Innis

In 2020, COVID 19 turned our lives upside down and inside out. This was a universally shared, yet individually experienced reality. Universally shared, in that everyone’s daily lives had been impacted. Individually experienced, as we have learned is that two people can have very different ways of responding to and coping with the stressors that come with changes. One friend, a cancer-survivor, had not been out of her house in a year except to walk her dog for 10 minutes a day and is mostly miserable. Another friend, a computer programmer, tells me that his life has changed very little because he was always an isolator anyway. Personally, I experienced alternating periods of relative “ok-ness” and abject grief and all shades in-between. I know a number of individuals I support who prefer having the built-in rationale for isolation that the pandemic has afforded them! Everyone is different in their response.