The Increasingly Apocalyptic Nature Of Receiving Emails During COVID.
Email content has been getting steadily more apocalyptic, so here is a definitive timeline from ‘see you very soon’ to ‘I hope you survive stepping outside tomorrow”.
March 2020: Believing this was all temporary.
My local club emailed me on the 21st March, sharing their condolences that they would need to close for a few weeks, but would throw a massive welcome-back party after the ‘temporary goodbye’. The email continued its rose-tinted glasses type view for the remainder of the email, before signing off with: “we look forward to seeing you very soon*”, “hosting one hell of a welcome back party*”, “remember we are ‘one nation under a groove!’”, “peace, love, and keep washing those hands!” (*didn’t end up happening). Looking back on this nearly a year later, I have to admire how aspirational we were that we could have a lockdown and then immediately return to life as normal- I wonder which month was the final straw that made us all accept that we were stuck in this odd virus-hell for the foreseeable future.
April 2020: Accepting it might take a little longer than expected.
I received an email at the start of April 2020 to reschedule a concert that had been planned for May. This email is the first one I received that referred to COVID as a real “threat”, and foreshadowed the steady decline of positive emails I would receive full of hope for a short-lived pandemic. I wasn’t surprised by the reschedule- we were still in our Very Strict Lockdown at this point- but appreciated the heads-up nonetheless. What was truly surprising was the set date to reschedule: the 18th of November 2020. The six month delay seemed pretty sufficient. We would have time to come out of the March lockdown, spend a couple of months gradually reopening things, and then be attending concerts at small venues, like Shepherds Bush Empire, around November. It turns out that I fell hook, line, and sinker for “can’t wait to see you then!”. If I’m not mistaken, I even tweeted the artist to say that I was looking forward to something positive to make up for the lockdown. If only I had known it was going to be the first of many lockdowns.
June 2020: Nobody had been coping well for months.
The student rental company I used for university emailed us in the middle of June 2020, when things were slowly beginning to reopen after months of nothingness. Like everyone else, lockdown and isolating and not getting to see friends/family took a mental strain on me. The email I received from the lettings agents encompassed this nicely- “I hope that after the past three months you have looked after yourselves both physically and mentally”. This lovely sentiment also highlighted something that has been a very real problem throughout the pandemic, whether that be one week into lockdown, or ten months into it: mental health suffered drastically, and for many people it has continued to suffer throughout the entire situation. Physical health is also hard to keep on top of when gyms and sports centres are closed (although Chloe Ting’s ‘ab challenge’ definitely took the world by storm). The recognition that these are “challenging times” was also a reminder that, despite society having to adjust to new ways of living, things are very far from what is ‘normal’ for us.
October 2020: This is now so normal that we have plans for every possible situation.
My university emailed me this in October 2020. By this point, life without masks and the possibility of ever hugging an elderly relative had been solidified as a distant dream. We had just had a second, strict national lockdown announced, and this email neatly summarises how the ‘new normal’ could no longer throw us any curveballs. You don’t have access to basic essentials? We have pre-made packages we can deliver to you! Bored in your accommodation? We have virtual events and activities to entertain you! Need to learn remotely for the next few weeks? We have alternative resources for you!
In many ways, the abundance of pragmatic resolutions to COVID-produced problems is alarming; every issue we could possibly imagine can and has occurred already so we needed to solve it as fast as possible. The echoing of mental and physical health importance is the same as the previous email, showing that our mental and physical struggles have yet to ease up. Calling the pandemic “a difficult time”, at that point in the year, was honestly putting it lightly.
October 2020– present day: The ‘stay safe’ and ‘there’s light at the end of the tunnel’ era.
Since October, every email I’ve received (and sent- sorry for my lack of originality) has had some variation of ‘stay safe’ as a sign off. Comparing the usual ‘kind regards’, or simply ‘best’, with ‘stay safe’ shows just how apocalyptic life has gotten. It sounds like the sort of witty one liner I’d expect when watching The Hunger Games, but now this is our life. The usual well-wishes and empty platitudes that we used to send out left, right and centre have been replaced with relatively foreboding terms like ‘soon we’ll see the light at the end of this tunnel’ (which I’m genuinely concerned about, considering what seeing light at the end of the tunnel usually means).
Conclusion:
The evolution of ‘see you very soon for a massive welcome-back party’ to ten months of isolation and limited contact stem from the worries and anxiety we have been feeling since the very start of this pandemic. As humorous as it feels to reminisce on our misguided belief that this would be a quick fix, it’s clear that the pandemic has had very real, very damaging impacts on our mental and physical health that we can’t help but highlight through emails. Phrases like ‘stay safe’ reflect our genuine desires to make sure everyone protects themselves as best they can so that we might, eventually, be able to see each other again without fear.
