When I recently accepted an offer to join the staff of The Denver Gazette full-time, ending two years of COVID-induced underemployment anxiety, I found myself awash in warm and wonderful feelings I hadn’t experienced in two years: Calmness. Clarity. Confidence. A way forward.

A celebration was in order. But I may have overdone it.

I took myself to the Sie Film Center and bought a ticket to a Wednesday matinee screening of “Drive My Car.” When the kindly concessions staff told me it was a three-hour movie, I threw all caution to the wind and bought both a large popcorn AND a large Diet Coke. All told, this act of spontaneous excess ran me $25. And I immediately felt a sense of dread and regret — like a person who buys a quart of ice cream and eats it all in one sitting. What was I doing spending $25 this way?

That was essentially the first discretionary income I had spent since April 3, 2020, when I took a Zoom call that cast me into the unyielding uncertainty of a pandemic with very few prospects for meaningful re-employment.

I have pretty much always lived within my means. But now, those means were imperiled and unknowable. So, when it comes to spending, something within me clicked — and has stayed clicked. I went directly into “essential spending only” mode.

According to my bank records, I haven’t used an ATM since Feb. 20, 2020 — two years ago today. I haven’t ordered a pizza. I haven’t turned the thermostat above 66 degrees. It’s funny how not having essential income tends to put an end to non-essential spending.

As the shutdown eased and people slowly started returning to their old lives, I had no old life to return to. For the first time in my adult life, I did not know where my next penny would come from. (And the privilege that has brought me to that epiphany was never more apparent.)

Most journalism jobs don’t pay much, but they pay enough. I have had the good fortune to have had a lifetime of salaried positions, complete with vacation and retirement benefits. To this day, I have left only one job voluntarily — although in newspapers, jobs do tend to leave you. I have worked for three newspapers that have suddenly closed down, and whenever that happens, like Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof,” we simply move on. But pandemic unemployment has been different. This was happening all at once to far more people across far more industries, and there was no way of knowing how long it would last.

At first, cutting back on non-essential spending was simply the responsible thing to do. I threw myself into the uncertainty of the gig life, chasing short-term assignments that brought small, irregular infusions of income. But now it’s two years later, I’ll soon be receiving a regular paycheck again, and I still don’t feel safe buying a movie ticket.

And health-care professionals say I’m far from alone.

“We’ve been through a national trauma unlike anything we have collectively experienced in most of our lifetimes,” said Joel Silverman, a licensed Boulder psychotherapist (and veteran local stage actor). “And when you go through the trauma of an entire society shutting down, the economic piece becomes a huge thing.

“But to me, this question is about far more than spending money. It’s, ‘Do I feel permission to do anything?’ We have been getting so many mixed messages on masks and vaccines and social gatherings that people are wondering, ‘Can I relax back into my life and enjoy myself under the circumstances we are in right now?’ ”

For the past two years, people have cut back not only on spending but on all social norms: Road trips, dinner parties, happy hours, worship, weddings, funerals, backyard hangouts and — perhaps most consequently — connecting with older relatives in meaningful ways. Silverman has a 2-year-old grandchild he has yet to even hold.

We’ve sacrificed (some voluntarily, others not) the ease and impulsiveness of life, and it is all collectively wearing on us. Hugs and handshakes have become awkward and aloof. The simple act of blowing out birthday candles can clear out the downwind half of a room. After two years of isolation, some wonder if we’ll ever be able to function in polite company again.

Thank goodness, Silverman says: All of that is completely understandable.

“It feels like we have a little bit of breathing room now, but naturally, a lot of people feel it could all go away again in a minute,” he said. That’s because we’ve seen everything from supply-chain shortages to catastrophic winter wildfires to urban terrorism to rising prices — and tensions — all along the way. “Some of it is real and some of it is just anxiety,” Silverman said. “But we are now living with the reality that life as we know it can change at any moment. Everyone is so done with this but, at the same time, people are still dying from this.”

What’s not so understandable — or at all acceptable — are the extreme manifestations of pandemic anxiety over recent days. A Thornton man reportedly threatened to kill the superintendent of Littleton Public Schools by injecting him with anthrax over a vaccine clinic hosted by the school district. Meanwhile, the Cherry Creek school board had to meet in a secret location on Monday after a perceived bomb threat from someone with a criminal history. This year alone, the Federal Aviation Administration has reported 255 midair incidences of unruly passenger behavior related to face masks.

“Those kinds of incidents are really troubling because people have felt powerless for so long now,” Silverman said. “And when people are told one last time, ‘No you don’t have any power in this situation,’ they hit some sort of breaking point. And that’s when you see an uptick in violence. The stress has become so much for people who don’t have good coping mechanisms that they lose their ability to judge what appropriate social behavior is like.”

This pandemic has further revealed the crisis of inadequate mental-health care in this country. People have been punishing themselves for what they have and have not accomplished during this unprecedented time. I tell them all, and myself, that right now, not losing everything is winning. Let’s give ourselves, and each other, some grace. May the coming months bring all of us some calm, some clarity, some confidence, a way forward … and an occasional guiltless pizza.

John Moore is the Denver Gazette’s Senior Arts Journalist.