About once a day, at the height of the pandemic, I’d be thinking about nothing in particular, when all of a sudden, I’d get flooded with panic:It’s never going to end.

I knew the history of pandemics. I knew that every single pandemic that ever happened had eventually ended. I even had a doctor friend who was working on the mRNA vaccines, who regularly kept me up to date on what seemed like real progress. But in those moments, it didn’t matter.What if this one is different? What if this goes on for years and years?

Compared to lots of people, I had a good pandemic. I haven’t gotten sick, and I didn’t lose my job. But even for those of us who’ve been lucky, the emotional toll has been considerable and unpredictable. In the past two years, we have all been through something.

At first, it was hard to adjust to the idea that something invisible could be so menacing. We would go outside and everything looked the same as ever. Then, all at once, everything stopped looking the same. Every day I’d go out for a walk, and sometimes, when I came to a previously busy street, I’d look down one way and then the other way and not see a single car. For at least a mile in either direction, at the height of the afternoon, no one was out.

In those early days, we didn’t know that the coronavirus was barely transmissible outdoors and that you couldn’t get it just by passing someone on the street. So everyone wore a mask around their neck and lifted it over their nose and mouth when they passed someone —ifthere was even anyone to pass. Most of the time people crossed the street to avoid each other.

Zoom helped, at first. In the beginning, we had Zoom cocktail hours with friends, and that was almost fun. Then it stopped being fun. It started to get depressing.

And remember how weird it was, signing off of Zoom? We’re used to it now, but it was such a strange thing, at first, pressing a button and seeing everyone suddenly disappear from the computer screen. The silence, as they say, was deafening.

In the 2010s, we heard a lot of nonsense about living virtually and having virtual friends and avatar identities and how that was going to be wonderful. During lockdown, we found out what that would be like — like not having a life. It turned out that it was hard enough seeing friends in an outdoor setting while 6 feet apart. It turned out that physically touching people actually counted for something.

At its worst, every day was the same, weekends included. The things that on a Tuesday we looked forward to doing on a Saturday — little things we took for granted, like dinners with friends — just vanished from our calendars, and it was a much bigger deal than we ever would have imagined. Tuesday needs the hope of a Saturday. The pandemic bought a life of endless Tuesdays.

Still, we found comfort in unexpected places. Everybody found something different. Everybody else’s source of comfort sounds weird. Here’s my weird one: I read Marie Kondo’s book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” and threw out all the underwear I didn’t like. Then I bought a lot of underwear I did like, and I folded it just like she said. (What can I tell you? It helped.)

Entertainment helped too. Actually, it helped a lot. One movie I particularly remember is“Hooking Up,”与山姆·理查森作为一个粗糙的浪漫喜剧guy with testicular cancer who goes on a road trip with a sex addict, played by Brittany Snow. Honestly, I don’t know if “Hooking Up” was any good or if it just happened to hit me right, but every time I go back to March 2020, I think of how that movie made me feel better.

There was also this great Danish TV show called “Borgen” (available to stream on Netflix) that for years people had been telling me to watch. In normal times, I’d think, “I have enough entertainment in my life — why do I want to spend 30 hours on a TV show, even if it’s good?” But in the pandemic, I had nothing better to do, and “Borgen” became this very nice world to return to on a daily basis. So did “The Great British Baking Show,” which was and is wonderful, even if you don’t bake. I was sorry when both were over.

Now the pandemic itself is almost over — maybe. At the very least, we have transitioned into a mode of living that’s much more like “normal” and much less like lockdown.

The year 2020 seems like a foreign country we don’t want to ever visit again. But for a while, we did live there, and as a result we’ll always appreciate the things we were deprived of. We’ll always feel glad that we escaped.