I got COVID on New Year’s Eve, right at the start of 2022, which is about the worst possible timing a person in my line of work could arrange. Because January is the year-end close. The big deadline, the last day of the month, everything due at once. I’m the one responsible for getting it all across the line. And there I was, ringing in the new year with a virus that would have been badly timed under any circumstances and was catastrophically timed for me.

I was not okay. I want to be clear about that, because it’s the center of this whole story. I wasn’t tired or run-down or dealing with a bad cold. I could not breathe. Not in the figure-of-speech way. In the actual, frightening, why-can’t-I-get-a-full-breath way. Two weeks in, I still wasn’t better, and the deadline was still coming, and so I did what I had always done. I pushed through. I went into the office sick, because that’s what the deadlines required.

I remember carrying boxes of files out to my car so I could keep working from home. And I remember standing in that parking lot, my arms full of the firm’s paperwork, completely unable to catch my breath. Me who has survived cancer twice, who knows what her own body feels like in real trouble, gasping in a parking lot with her arms full of other people’s deadlines. I got home genuinely scared that day. It eventually subsided, the panic and the worst of the breathlessness, but for a while there I was frightened in a way I recognized.

And do you know what the response was, from the firm I had given so much of myself to? Waved it off as long Covid, as if that were a minor footnote, not really registering that I was telling them I literally could not breathe. That I was describing an emergency, not an inconvenience.

That was the moment something clarified for me, permanently. I understood, standing on the other side of that dismissal, that to them I was not exactly a person. I was a function. A tool for delivering the thing that was due. My inability to breathe was a problem mainly insofar as it threatened the deadline. I had hoped, over the years, that I was valued as more than that, that all the seven-day tax seasons and the loyalty and the showing up had bought me some standing as a human being. And Covid showed me, cleanly and without cruelty exactly, that work is work. I was there to deliver. That was the deal, whether or not I’d understood it as the deal. I’ve carried that realization ever since. It changed how I see a firm, and my whole place in my career. Not bitterly, just clearly. Some illusions, once they go, don’t come back.

The rest of that time was its own strange picture. There were five or six of us packed into a two-bedroom condo. My son’s girlfriend was staying with us, because her own father worked in a hospital and was terrified of bringing the virus home to her, so our place became her safe harbor for the duration. That’s a thing I’m quietly glad about, actually, that our crowded little condo could be somewhere safe for someone else when she needed it. It was tight, and it was financially hard, all of us stacked in together like that. And I’ll be honest that the confinement was difficult on my newer relationship, that being sealed in together during all of it asked more of us than we were ready to give. That’s a story for another page. But it was part of the situation of that time.

There were things I liked, too, which feels almost strange to admit about a pandemic. I liked what it did for the natural world, the way everything got quieter and cleaner for a while, the sense of the earth exhaling. And I came out of it knowing something about myself I hadn’t fully known going in: that I wanted the autonomy of working from home. That the version of my working life where I dragged my sick body into an office to carry boxes to my car was not the version I wanted to keep living. The pandemic clarified that, the way it clarified a lot of things for a lot of people. It sorted the wanted from the unwanted.

I think, looking back, Covid is going to matter in the way historical things matter. It was a genuine time of struggle, and not just for me. So many people lost so much, far more than I did. I don’t want to overstate my own small chapter of it. I kept my family safe, I kept working, I got through. Plenty of people can’t say the same, and I hold that.

But my own private takeaway from it is simple, and it’s stayed with me. I learned, gasping in a parking lot with my arms full of files nobody would have carried for me, exactly what I was to the place I’d given my best years to. And I learned, in the quiet of that overcrowded condo, exactly what I wanted the rest of my working life to look like instead. Some lessons you’d never sign up for. This one arrived anyway, on New Year’s Eve, and it turned out to be one I needed.