Since I was diagnosed with breast cancer and had my related existential crisis in 2019, I was still processing my grief and experiencing post-traumatic growth when the pandemic hit. So it was interesting to stand by and watch the rest of the world take the red pill and slowly wake up to their mortality a bit. I had a new wellspring of empathy and felt what others were going through on a much more personal and vivid level. And yet I still have lots of my own work to do. It’s exhausting trying to find my “new normal” post-cancer in COVID isolation from friends, family, live music gigs, and the other coping mechanisms that got me through the worst times.