Covid didn’t kill me

Hi, I’m Kaan Tulunay, a comedian from İstanbul, and I want to share my experience of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Did That Really Happen?

I’m a 30-year-old guy from İstanbul, and sometimes I feel like I don’t really have 30 years of life experience. It’s not that I didn’t live those years, but there’s a strange little gap in my memory.

When I try to remember my life before the lockdown, everything feels distant. Almost like I’m remembering someone else’s life.

The Lockdown Changed Something

I was already an introvert before COVID-19. So my life before the global pandemic was already a kind of lockdown.

I was used to staying at home. I was used to spending long periods alone. I didn’t need a crowded social life to feel comfortable. While other people complained about being trapped inside, a part of me thought, “Well… this isn’t completely unfamiliar.”

The Glass Half Full

At first, there were even beautiful things happening outside our windows.

The air seemed cleaner. The sky looked bluer. The plants looked greener. With fewer cars on the roads and fewer people outside, nature seemed to be taking a small breath.

There was something strangely peaceful about it.

The March of Time

While the world was becoming quieter, many people were becoming louder inside their own heads.

People lost jobs. Businesses disappeared. Families were separated. Some people lost loved ones. Others spent months worrying about elderly parents, children, money, or their own health.

And then there were people like me, who didn’t necessarily lose everything, but somehow still felt that something had been taken away.

Time.

Maybe that’s what I lost.

Returning to Normal

It feels like someone pressed pause, and then suddenly pressed play again.

Except when the world started moving again, I wasn’t exactly the same person who had been standing there when it stopped.

I think many of us experienced this in different ways.

We learned how to attend meetings without leaving our beds. We learned how to celebrate birthdays through screens. We learned how to order almost anything without going outside. We became comfortable with being uncomfortable.

And after a while, normal life itself started to feel strange.

The Pandemic Taught Us How Vulnerable Modern Life Really Is

It almost feels like a different era.

And maybe that’s why I sometimes feel younger than 30. Not physically, of course. But socially.

There are experiences I feel like I should have had by now. Conversations I should have had. Friendships I should have built. Places I should have visited. Moments that should have happened naturally, but somehow never did.

The pandemic didn’t create all of my problems. Some of them were already there.

But it amplified them.

Small World, Big Fears

For an introvert, isolation can sometimes feel safe. You can hide inside your own world and convince yourself that you’re perfectly fine.

But too much isolation can also make that world smaller. And when the world becomes smaller, your fears can become bigger by comparison.

You start overthinking simple conversations. You forget how to approach people. You become comfortable with avoiding things.

You tell yourself, “Maybe tomorrow.”

Then tomorrow becomes next week. Next week becomes next month.

And eventually, you realize that you’ve been waiting for life to restart.

But life doesn’t always restart by itself. You have to step back into it.

From Lockdown to the Limelight

Maybe that’s why I found myself drawn to stand-up comedy.

Because stand-up is almost the opposite of everything the pandemic taught me to become.

You can’t do stand-up alone in your room. You have to leave the house, stand in front of strangers, look them in the eye, speak to them, listen to their reactions, and accept the possibility that your joke might completely fail.

You have to turn your experiences into stories, and your fears into something you can laugh about.

And strangely enough, that process is exactly what I think I need.

I Can’t Get the Years Back, but I Can Chase the Moments I Missed

Now I’m 30. And I’m still trying to figure out where those missing years went.

But I have no intention of waiting idly for them to come back.

I’m going to chase all those missed conversations through stand-up comedy.

Broken, but Not Useless

So, yes. Coronavirus didn’t kill me.

But it broke something.

And perhaps broken things aren’t always useless. Sometimes they can be rebuilt.

Slowly. Awkwardly. One show at a time.

I may not feel like I have 30 years of life experience. But I’m still here.

And maybe that means the story isn’t about what the pandemic took from me anymore. Maybe it’s about what I choose to build after it.

And I’d love for you to be part of this journey, and to see where it takes me.