As a society, we’ve moved on… but not really.

It’s been five years since the world shut down.

Since we watched daily death tallies scroll across our screens. Since we scrubbed our shopping (did you ever do that? The one time I did, I was so depressed I made a  choice there and then that I’d rather have covid than ever wash groceries again!) feared door handles, and were told to stay home — unless you were one of the ones who couldn’t.

At the time, I was a senior manager in a homelessness organisation. Hundreds of vulnerable people across London boroughs relied on our support. Like many others, we had no guidance, no PPE, no systems. Just shifting advice and the crushing responsibility to keep people safe, without any real understanding of what that meant. Whilst Boris was advising people to stay at home (sometimes), and Sadiq advising us not to use public transport (after the death of several bus drivers), my staff teams, amongst the lowest paid staff in the organisation, still had to come to work, despite having vulnerable people at home. I myself chose to go to work because I simply could not ask people in my teams to do something I was not prepared to do myself, although I must admit, I had the luxury of driving.

It was chaos. And it wasn’t just policy failure or lack of resources — it was the slow erosion of certainty, trust, and resilience. I watched my team burn out. I saw social services vanish behind screens, asking us to do their jobs while they worked from home. I lived with the fear that someone would die on my watch- not from covid but from negligence, or violence or suicide.

And yet, somehow, we’re expected to have just... moved on.

That’s what’s really striking to me now. Not just what we went through, but the absence of space to talk about it. No national reckoning. No widespread workplace debriefs. No real space to grieve the losses — of people, of normality, of who we were before.

We carried on. But at what cost?

Many of us are still carrying the legacy of that period. In our bodies. In our nervous systems. In the way we react to uncertainty, or feel overwhelmed without knowing why. We lived through something traumatic — yes, traumatic — and we were never really invited to name it.

Imagine if, instead, we’d created forums in our workplaces, our communities, our schools. If we’d said: “Let’s pause. Let’s talk about what just happened. Let’s honour what we’ve survived.”

Well guess what? We still can.

If you're tired, angry, changed in some way — it’s not just you. It’s what we went through. And I really think it’s time we started talking about it.

Please write me your story if you would like to share. I might even create a webpage with our anonymous stories, just as a place to get it all off our chests.