A year ago, my psychotherapy practice safely operating through a screen, I gave away my office furniture and turned in my keys. I felt lucky about my month-to-month lease but wondered if I was making a mistake. Might things get back to normal with summer here? Premature reopening and optimism soon gave way to an escalating spike in cases and deaths, making it clear that Covid disruption was going to be profound and long-lasting.

As always, I asked my clients how they were doing. After long consideration, one replied, “I’m okay,” before adding, “When things are really okay, that’s when I’ll freak out.”

My client’s remark captures the coping through numbness that has typified the last year and a half. We’ve all experienced the Groundhog Day sensation of being trapped in the same day over and over again. Cut off from our normal lives, we’ve also had to cut off our feelings to survive.

For a long time in therapy, Covid crowded out everything else. Sessions felt like highly repetitive check-ins, with reminders to breathe and practice self-compassion. A close therapist friend and I marveled that people were willing to pay us for this. Feeling helpless and shell-shocked ourselves, we lost sight of the value of simply being there.

Gradually, there was room for deeper exploration. My clients still talked a lot about Covid, but they also talked about the 2020 elections, George Floyd’s murder, and, of course, the issues that brought them to therapy in the first place. Despite not meeting in person, it began to feel like therapy again.

Unsurprisingly, each person’s pandemic experience was filtered through psyche and circumstance. For one client who lives in constant terror at the best of times, leaving the house even while triply masked felt like stepping into a fusillade of invisible Covid bullets. Family dynamics were illuminated through heartbreaking rifts over the virus. People—including me–had to confront their often intense feelings of hostility and judgment toward unmasked people they passed on the street. There was plenty of resilience, but also a quiet unraveling.

In the midst of exhaustion and angst, something else emerged over the last year and a half: greater self-knowledge, clearer boundaries and priorities, a sense of wanting to retain some of what Covid necessitated. So many of my clients have expressed gratitude for life becoming simpler, for not having to engage with activities or people they don’t particularly like, for discovering what’s truly important to them.

With vaccines bringing relief and freedom, we are beginning to feel what we have needed to keep at bay: grief, loss, and anger, but also hope and gratitude. There’s a profound savoring of the little things we used to take for granted.

Yet reopening is also triggering the jitters. How are we to interpret a masked or maskless face? Will letting down our guard lead to a disastrous spike? Must we don social artifice, return to functions and relationships we haven’t missed, invest in elaborate ventilation and contact tracing plans for our offices? What happens now?

Perhaps my client’s prediction is coming true as our numbness begins to thaw: Now that things are better, it’s safe enough to freak out.