This essay is part of Survive. Thrive. Evolve: How Two Years of the Pandemic Impacted Us Around the World, a global HuffPost project featuring individuals writing about how their lives were affected after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The following piece originally appeared on HuffPost Korea. It has been translated into English and lightly edited for clarity.

Two years have passed since COVID-19 brought upheaval to our lives in South Korea. So many people have lost something that, before the pandemic, was a fun and meaningful part of their lives.

If you ask me, a huge fan of the K-pop group NCT 127, what I lost to COVID-19, I would immediately say face-to-face concerts. Concerts and overseas music tours were canceled, and face-to-face events were replaced by virtual events, so we have only been able to see our favorite K-pop groups on a screen.

Fans like me have been longing for in-person performances. In November 2021, our government implemented a process intended to bring some normalcy back via the With Corona policy. Face-to-face events and concerts, which had been prohibited up until that point, were now allowed to take place with fewer than 500 fully vaccinated people in attendance. Large-scale performances could be held if they were approved by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.

The entertainment industry did not want to miss this opportunity to begin staging live shows again, so many promoters hurriedly began to organize concerts. My prayers for an NCT 127 performance were answered with the news that a three-day concert series was going to take place at the Gocheok Sky Dome in Seoul. This venue usually accommodates about 20,000 concertgoers, but due to the COVID protocol, the number of tickets for each show was limited to 5,000. The fans were overjoyed, especially since these concerts were NCT 127s first in-person performances in Korea since January 2019.

As soon as the concerts were announced, many fans said they would be willing to do anything even hang from the Sky Domes ceiling for the chance to see the shows. We all wanted K-pop back, but now that it was returning, fans were stressed out because they knew how much competition there would be to get tickets and because no one knew how long it would be before more concerts would take place.

I was barely able to purchase a ticket for the first concert. As the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases skyrocketed to the same level as my excitement, I became really worried that the concerts would be canceled. I decided to stay home from the moment I got my ticket up until the concert because I didnt want to risk coming into contact with someone who had COVID and lose my chance to see the show.

Finally, December 17, 2021 the first day of NCT 127s face-to-face concert series arrived. The governments vaccine pass rule applied to any performances with more than 500 attendees, so concert staff had to check for proof of vaccination and negative PCR test results from all audience members as we entered the dome. We were each assigned to a seat with one empty seat between us, and masks were mandatory for the duration of the event.

I nervously made my way into the concert hall after my identity and vaccination certificate had been checked. Fans were told to keep in mind the three major mayos (a Korean meme that combines the words mayonnaise and mayo, from the expression hajimayo, or dont): Dont scream. Dont stand up. Dont walk around. I was worried that I might subconsciously start doing any one of these things because I, like most people, was so used to singing and screaming and shouting at concerts.