Four times a week I worked with exercise specialists. I did everything they told me, the most attentive student anyone could hope for. I even moved away from Melbourne, because living somewhere smaller and quieter helped my body heal.

But even in throwing everything I could into my recovery, I only made it 80 per cent of the way back to my "former life". I soon discovered that life is frustratingly unpredictable, and other things would happen to me that would unravel the progress I had made. I learnt that rehab isn't something you do once. Rehab is something you sometimes have to do for the rest of your life.

It's not a comfortable realisation, this idea that life has changed irrevocably. It is an act of both remembering and forgetting. Forgetting the body you once were, forgetting some of the person, forgetting the life - because you are not the same. But if you can live alongside that loss, you can make something new. You can find joy and pleasure, it just looks and feels a little different now.

Watching the COVID pandemic unfold in Australia reminds me of the early years of my illness, when I was in the depths of learning to balance remembering and forgetting parts of myself. I see thousands of people trying to get back to the life they had "before". I see people focused on remembering, unwilling or not knowing that to survive this we must also forget, at least a little, what life before the pandemic was like.

As someone who is at heightened risk of COVID, I never came out of the Delta lockdowns. I can count the number of people I have been in a room with in the past seven months on one hand. Getting back, or in the political vernacular of Omicron, "getting through" to the other side (to what our national messaging suggests is something akin to our 2019 pre-pandemic life), isn't an option for me.

Like many people with chronic illnesses, this locked-down life of mine is here to stay for some time. Once again, I am learning to live alongside the life I had before, and the very changed life I have now.

While theories and predictions abound, we can't know what will happen next with the pandemic. We do know, however, that the virus can be caught multiple times, and that it can mutate into versions that require more or new vaccines. This means the pandemic is likely continue for some time yet. Herd immunity cannot be achieved for viruses that can be caught multiple times. We've never achieved herd immunity for the common cold or the flu, for example.

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As Professor Raina MacIntyre has argued, an epidemic disease like COVID-19 cannot become endemic - it is simply too infectious and changeable. Rather than the background noise of a cold, it is likely to continue to follow the "wave" pattern we have seen so far.

Returning to pre-pandemic life, at least in the next few years, may in fact not be a reality for anyone. In trying to get back to a 2019 life, by "pushing through" these past few months, we have found ourselves faced with shocking workforce shortages and weakened supply chains.

I know the idea we may not be able to return to a pre-pandemic life is frightening. I know you don't want to hear that the pandemic may not end at Omicron.

The past three years have been profoundly difficult, and not one of us wants to be forced to contemplate that the confined and stressful living we have endured could go on for several more years. But as someone who does not have the option to try and move through the world as though the pandemic isn't still happening, I invite you to join me in contemplating this more uncertain future.

I invite you to ask yourself, "What if we can't 'get back' to pre-pandemic life?" and sit with the idea of forgetting what we once had, so that we may move forward. If we stop striving for a life that looked as it did before COVID-19 existed, what future might we imagine instead?