Look, we all know the pandemic was a weird time. I think we’re starting to forget, now, with the sun shining and everything returned to more-or-less normal — beginning to forget just how much it forced us to realign the way we thought.

All of a sudden, isolation was a virtue and a blessing, and interaction — that fundamental human building block — was a crime. We went a long, long time without mixing with each other, without meeting new people, without casual encounters and birthday drinks and polite, nodding conversational mixers.

And so, when we started to emerge from it, I was nervous.

I am (was) socially anxious by nature, and pre-pandemic had got quite used to living a life where anything social was accompanied by a sense of dread for several days beforehand. Over the years I’d built up a repertoire of coping mechanisms and tricks that meant I was largely managing, but it was always a bit of a struggle.

Then came the pandemic. By summer 2021, I’d had a year-long break from the social anxiety of events and meeting new people. The break was welcome, but I was worried that I’d have forgotten all the coping mechanisms and old tricks that used to get me through.

Instead, something insane happened. Far from exacerbating it, the pandemic cured my social anxiety.

I’ve never known anything like it. I’ve gone from dreading social events to actively looking forward to them. A lot. The space I had reserved for pre-event dread has somehow been replaced by a foreign emotion called ‘excitement’. I’ve even started to consider the possibility that I might be an extrovert.

The obvious reason for it would be that, after isolation-nation, I’m just so desperate to see people again that the anxiety has taken a backseat. But I really don’t think that’s it — we’ve been back to ‘normal’ for a while now, and the novelty’s worn off, but the extroversion hasn’t.

My wholly unscientific theory is actually this: anxiety is a habit. It’s something you acquire over years and years, and after a while your brain hears “social event” and goes “ah, yes, I know what to do here! activate the anxiety zone!”. You subconsciously practise feeling anxious day after day after day, until it becomes your normal response to pretty much anything and impossible to unlearn.

Quite by chance, I got a year of grace in which I realigned those habits. That’s not to say I wasn’t anxious in 2020 — like everybody I had a lot of sleepless nights wondering if the world was ending. But I got a year to fix my social anxiety habit, and it worked.

I don’t really know what to take from this. I can’t “roll out” my cure to anyone else — in a way I got a bit lucky, having the year I did.

But there it is. The pandemic cured my anxiety. And I’m gloriously, unexpectedly free.