A few weeks ago, I was packing for a work trip. Without thinking, I threw a few face masks into my bag, as I had done for every previous journey over the past three years. And then I paused – it had been just the previous day that the World Health Organisation declared the Covid-19 global health emergency over.

The announcement was widely reported, but it wasn’t billed as major news – many people had been thinking of the pandemic as “over” for months, returning completely to a “normal” life. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but then a day later, looking at the extensive collection of face masks I had built up over the years, it really hit me.

Humans are really fascinating, and it’s amazing what we can get used to. Almost every aspect of our lives was completely upended in March 2020, and we entered a situation that many of us could never have imagined. If you had taken someone, in the spring of 2019, and showed them images of the deserted streets of Dublin, closed schools, empty offices, and people wearing masks and not approaching each other, I think they would have been more likely to believe it was a science fiction film than the reality of just a year later.

Now that those restrictions are behind us, it might be possible to forget that they happened at all – indeed, many of us may prefer that. But they did happen. Our lives were disrupted, in a completely unexpected and very unsettling way. It’s right for us to move on, and put the pandemic behind us. But it’s also important to recognise the impact it might have had. I was recently speaking to a mother who explained that her son, who graduated from university last year, seemed completely lost. Apart from the fact that many people feel lost at that age, she believes he is still struggling to come to terms with the huge unexpected changes brought by the pandemic. She told me she had been trying to help her son realise that it was ok to recognise how difficult the past three years had been.

I was reminded of hearing others speak about delayed plans, qualifications which they expected to have by now, or job moves they wish they had already made. It isn’t fair to judge our progress in the past three years in any area of life on a “normal” scale. We have experienced something devastating, and while it’s good to move on from that, we need to recognise it in evaluating how far we have come – and how well we are doing just to have come through it.