I have spent a great deal of time attempting to manage my feelings and not enough trying to understand them. I have, at different points in my life, experienced all the various emotions resulting from common life events: love, failure, relationship breakdown, bereavement. Then the world was hit by a global pandemic. An unprecedented event for myself - and for a whole generation. My immediate reaction was the same as most people’s. Surprise, incredulity, fear – for myself, my parents, my friends. Panic, conspiracies, self-medicating. Exactly what I would expect from it. It’s a frightful state of affairs. The main focus is to try to survive. But there’s more. There’s got to be more. It would be silly, almost irresponsible, not to take the opportunity to reflect on the emotions resulting from this extraordinary set of circumstances, to learn from it things that otherwise we may never have questioned. I have caught myself swimming against inexplicable waves of excitement a