Freedom! Apparently! England has returned to something that kind of looks like normality. No more locking down, no more social distancing, no more perfectly sensible rules to follow, just a great big pestilential free-for-all (at the time of writing at least – I dread to think how many Covid variants and public health policy backflips will have occurred by the time this reaches your eyes).

I’m persevering with the whole try-not-to-kill-anyone approach, but no matter how masked and distant we keep things, there’s no avoiding that we’re gradually going back to the way things were.

Virus aside, my feelings about this are … mixed. The great reemergence isn’t going to signal that radical a change for me, just as lockdown had very little effect on my lifestyle in the first place. Working from home and being socially distant has been my default setting for years; a daily routine of keeping human interaction to an absolute minimum.

I enjoy working alone in my own space … but there comes a point when solitude is a cage rather than a choice

For the awkward, panicky and shy, mandatory isolation has been weirdly kind of cosy, so I find myself nervous about the opening up of the world (or rather the country – the world isn’t exactly crying out for visitors from our funny little ‘plague island’).

Am I hermit because I’m a designer … or am I designer because I’m a hermit? I enjoy working alone in my own space, to my own rhythm, with my own peculiarities, but there comes a point when solitude is a cage rather than a choice. Even before Covid struck I found myself getting increasingly resistant to adventures beyond it, tackling social anxiety with isolation.

Of course, that choice has been out of my hands for the last 18 months – I’m a government-mandated hermit – so I’ve been able to pretend it’s not a problem. I’d love to make it to your event, but I must decline for the good of the human race! I’m distancing from friends, peers, teachers, students, colleagues, everyone – to protect the NHS! I can’t make it to the meeting because meetings aren’t allowed – NOW LOOK AT MY BOOKSHELVES! People? People? No thank you!

I’ve been able to indulge in the comfort of seclusion, stubbornly pretending that the protection of physical health hasn’t been at the detriment of mental health. From (online, text only) conversations with other designers, this seems to be pretty common amongst other living-at-work freelancers.

Society is finding a new pattern, made from the finest silver linings of the pandemic

This so-called Freedom Day has made me face up to things, acknowledge the unhealthy rut I’d worked myself into and recognise what freedoms I’d been taking for granted. I’m not staying in this cage. Selfishly speaking, it helps that I’ve emerged at the same time as the rest of the country; society’s base level of anxiety has been brought in line with my own.

Society is finding a new pattern, made from the finest silver linings of the pandemic. One big lesson has been that great swathes of the working population don’t need to go to work. We’ve spent decades perfecting machines that enable people to work together regardless of proximity, and yet we’ve stubbornly clung on to this idea that the machines are somehow specialist pieces of equipment that should all be housed in one expensive building an hour or so away from where the people who use them live (with their own near-identical machines).

It’s taken an intervention from a microscopic bastard to nudge us towards the more pragmatic future we’ve long been preparing for, and to nudge me out of my malaise.The shift may take a while to bed in, but there’s undoubtedly going to be more home-workers, new kinds of work-social opportunities, different ways to engage with people on and off-screen. New freedoms.

Daniel Benneworth-Gray is a freelance designer based in York; danielgray.com; @gray