What’s Normal, Anyway?

Is this it? Are we really living in “the new normal?” Coined in 1918 by American inventor Henry A. Wise Wood in the aftermath of World War I, the “new normal” refers to the final of three periods that sum up a particular timeline—war, transition, “new normal.” The buzzword has since been used to describe societal changes after national and global crises like 9/11, the Great Recession, and now the COVID-19 pandemic.

When the world collapsed into itself in 2020, it felt like a kind of war. We stayed inside, away from each other, afraid of an invisible, extremely transmissible virus. When the vaccine arrived the next year, we grabbed onto this Hail Mary and held tight. That was the transition. Almost half a decade later, we’re living in a permanently altered society.

We talk about the pandemic in past tense, a force that swiftly shook the world and left just as suddenly. But the coronavirus lingers and continues to send aftershocks, five years after the first lockdowns went into effect.

Katherine Saxton, Santa Clara University associate professor of biology and public health, says the world is acting as if we’re in an endemic stage—when a disease is controlled or below a certain level. But we might be kidding ourselves.

“I think we’ve decided to treat COVID as endemic because we think it’s acceptable, but the virus is still behaving like a pandemic because you do see outbreaks,” Saxtons says. “We get to decide what acceptable means.”

Amidst the rush to achieve normalcy, perhaps we overlooked important questions about how we rebuild from this crisis. While it is totally normal to crave normalcy, we must question if it’s worth striving for.

For starters, you can’t really define it. Just as everyone has their own experience of the pandemic, everyone has a different idea of what’s normal. Patrick A. Donohoe, S.J. Professor of Communication Laura Ellingson calls it a “squish term,” one that lets us draw imaginary lines to decide who fits into society and who gets left out.

“I deliberately try not to use the word normal because disability studies theorists have long pointed out that what is considered to be normal is also often considered to be what is ideal,” Ellingson says. It leaves out too many people.

For those of us who are able, we move forward by embracing the new normal. But some may be left behind. Either because they’re stuck longing for what was, or they don’t have the ability to move into something new.

Breaking Binaries

As humans, we like to categorize. Sick or well. Abled or disabled. But chronic illness doesn’t fit into such binaries. And long COVID is no different.

Five years ago, when medical professionals were swamped with initial outbreaks, the condition barely had a definition aside from nonspecific symptoms ranging from breathing issues to brain fog. Now, the Centers for Disease Control defines it as a chronic condition occurring for at least three months after an initial COVID infection. That’s a lot of vagueness for a species that likes clean-cut definitions.

For the estimated 400 million individuals who have dealt with long COVID worldwide, there is no formula which will predict the duration, severity, or the nature of their symptoms. The known variables are that it’s often invisible and misunderstood.

In 2021, Professor Ellingson, a bone cancer survivor living with late effects of cancer treatment, wrote a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle called “What cancer taught me about long-haul COVID: Everyone stops caring after you survive.” She discussed how narratives of cancer, like COVID, often center on one’s “heroic survival or tragic death,” neglecting the complex and continuous ways the disease refigures people’s lives after the fact.

“I wish people were more willing to think about and deal with their own vulnerability and to have compassion for people with chronic illnesses. Unfortunately, I feel like for the most part, we have a very rugged, individualistic culture that says, ‘Just deal with it.’”

“I wish people were more willing to think about and deal with their own vulnerability and to have compassion for people with chronic illnesses,” Ellingson says. “Unfortunately, I feel like for the most part, we have a very rugged, individualistic culture that says, ‘Just deal with it.’”

Patti Collins, a member of the COVID-19 Long Haulers Support Facebook group, is very familiar with the “just deal with it” sentiment. She’s been dealing with long COVID since January 2021. After spending a week in the hospital on the brink of death, Collins was released home and faced something perhaps even more daunting: the gray area of chronic illness.

For the next few months, Collins took a disability leave from her leadership position at a Fortune 100 tech firm. Simple routines—getting out of bed, putting on clothes, making food, working—suddenly felt out of reach.

“I’m so independent,” Collins says. “Having traveled here from New York by myself, for me not to be able to walk to get my mail and heavy breathing, it was just devastating.”

When Collins returned to work part-time after five months, she would sleep in between meetings. She’d look at her own PowerPoint presentations and be unable to recognize strings of words. “I knew I wasn’t ready to go back, but I had no choice,” she says. “The team needed me.”

At the time, doctors didn’t know how to help long COVID patients, but she eventually found a post-COVID recovery program at St. Jude Medical Center in Orange County, commuting an hour to relearn how to get up from a chair. Social activities were replaced by doctors’ appointments, alternative therapies, and self-care practices.

Collins says her family and friends supported her but encouraged her to try to move on. We’ve all heard these words of encouragement when sick. Toughen up. You can do it. Just push through. “In our country, vulnerability is not something that people lean into. It’s just the opposite,” Collins says.

In a culture focused on reacting to acute medical distress, we often struggle to accept when an illness has no clear endpoint. We’re great at moving quickly in an emergency, not so much in the gray area between very sick and well. Amidst our attachment to normalcy, we’ve inadvertently separated ourselves from those of us who are vulnerable. Moreover, we’ve turned our backs on vulnerability itself.

Seeing Vulnerability

At the height of the pandemic, we were scared and uncertain, upon seeing our bodies as vectors of disease. For many able-bodied people, it was the first time confronting the fact that we are all fragile beings. We recognized our potential for vulnerability, and decided we didn’t want anything to do with it.

Margaret McLean, emerita senior lecturer of religious studies and senior fellow at Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, says the ethical lessons we learned from the beginning of the pandemic about being in community and protecting others have “faded in memory.” This amnesia, as a way of processing collective trauma and loss, left behind the vulnerable—those with long COVID, the elderly, immunocompromised, marginalized communities, frontline workers.

“Our memories are short and coming out of the pandemic, people were so desperate to get back to normal, whatever that was,” she says. “People had different definitions of “normal” and none of them included the commonality of vulnerability that we felt during the height of the pandemic.”

When schools transitioned back to in-person teaching, surges were still rampant so English teaching professor Maggie Levantovskaya taught online even though it felt alienating at times. Levantovskaya has lupus and did not feel comfortable yet returning to the classroom.

“In some ways that was a really frustrating period of the pandemic because it really felt like people were not on the same page,” she says.

While it’s not as common to see people in masks these days, wearing them in public spaces like airports and hospitals is still automatic for Levantovskaya.

“I do think that I’ve internalized that not being masked connects you more to people, it makes you more expressive and makes your teaching better for the students,” she says. “As much as you can be really aware of ableist culture, you still internalize a lot of that stuff.”

Even though masks were a fashion statement during the pandemic, now they’ve become a kind of name tag that signals vulnerability. Those with chronic illness are constantly aware of society’s tendency to “other” them, despite that mask-wearing was once a universal practice.

Building Better

Imagine a world where wearing a mask doesn’t signal weakness. Where people don’t have to decide between losing their job or working when sick, where every individual can get adequate healthcare and time off for chronic conditions. Where students with chronic illness can socialize and feel safe. Where you are still considered whole if you are sick.

The pandemic brought some of those dreams into focus. Employers normalized flexible and remote work options, mental health days, and Zoom meetings for convenience. According to Pew Research Center, before the pandemic just 7% of the U.S. population worked from home. In 2023, more than one third of Americans who have a job that allows them to work remotely are doing so 100% of the time.

But this culture shift toward flexibility is seemingly shifting back—a return to an old normal versus a shift to a new one. Many companies are beginning to mandate in-person returns to the office, despite evidence that this can damage morale. Gallup’s latest research also shows a concerning trend: Compared to the early days of the pandemic, less than half as many employees in 2024 believed their organization cares about their well-being.

If returning to normal looks different for everyone, “normal” shouldn’t dictate what our society looks like, or who gets to belong.

Leavey School of Business assistant professor of management Hooria Jazaieri sees this trend as alarming because individuals spend about one third of their lives in the workplace. “To think that people feel like for a third of their lives, they can’t bring their full selves or that they don’t trust the person they’re working with, or it’s not a psychologically safe place is a shame,” she says.

Jazaieri explains that while employees have protections under the American with Disabilities Act many don’t feel comfortable sharing personal information or asking for accommodations because of the unstable job market. Yet when employees feel like they can be their authentic selves at work, they tend to perform better which increases an organization’s productivity.

“The other side of the coin is instead of requiring the employee to ask for the reasonable accommodations, let’s just put the accommodations in place,” she says.

This could look like organizations adopting an unlimited paid time off policy, so employees don’t have to worry about job security during a chronic illness flare-up. Beyond the workplace, mask-wearing could continue to be the norm in high-risk public places like pharmacies or medical offices to protect vulnerable people. Instead of people having to seek care from several doctors for the same chronic condition and wait months to be seen, healthcare systems could innovate more centralized means of care.

To build this world, we must challenge the rigid architecture that systems are built upon. We must strive for a place where everyone—regardless of their vulnerabilities—feels cared for.

While it’s unknown what this looks like exactly, it starts with questioning “the new normal” and wondering what could take its place. If returning to normal looks different for everyone, “normal” shouldn’t dictate what our society looks like, or who gets to belong. Remember, normal is a squish term.

Instead, by hoping for a world that embraces vulnerability, our attachment to normalcy can evolve. We can get curious about whether any of us even fit into the confines of normal. After all, we are constantly changing. And isn’t that the most normal thing about being human?