Gavin Newsom says that he may “regret” some of the lockdowns he imposed on California in 2020.

That’s nice. It’s also far too late for those of us still suffering the nightmare that caused in our lives.

I opened my cycling gym, Spin 360, in 1998, on Arrow Highway in Glendora. Indoor cycling was new. There were no other spin studios nearby. People came because they wanted something different, and they stayed because it became a community — faith, sweat, and the same faces week after week.

That community is what the state of California tore apart.

California had the longest COVID lockdowns in the country. My studio was forced to close for 58 weeks.

When we were finally allowed back, it was not a reopening. It was 5%, then 10%, then 15% capacity. Masks. Plastic barriers. Inspections. Fines. Customers who had been loyal for years were told to be afraid of one another. Many never came back. I lost 87% of my members.

Then came the loan. It was supposed to be a lifeline. It has become a leash.

The US Small Business Administration (SBA) Economic Injury Disaster Loan was calculated off my 2018 and 2019 tax returns — the years the business was healthy, before anyone had heard of a pandemic. There was no pandemic in those numbers. There was no 58-week shutdown in those numbers. There was no lingering fear in California in those numbers.

The money arrived at the end of 2021 into 2022. By then I was not running the 2019 business. I was starting over — worse than starting over — because the customers who used to fill the room still carried the fear the state had spent a year and a half teaching them. Payments came due on a schedule built for a gym that no longer existed.

The SBA’s answer to that gap was a short hardship window. Six months of reduced payments, then you snap back to the original amount as if nothing happened. After that, the message is grim and simple: die, or close the doors and file bankruptcy. Those are the exits.

A year ago an SBA agent called me. She was kind. She was tired. She said she gets millions of letters and hate coming to work because they all say the same thing: The loan was sized to a business that the lockdowns destroyed, and the business never came all the way back.

Friends and family in my world lost restaurants. Neighborhood gyms went dark. The storefronts did not reopen with a new owner and a fresh start. They just went away.

I am 62. Starting over in 1998 was hard, but it was possible. The idea was new. The room filled because people were curious and not afraid.

Starting over now means competing with that lingering COVID fear, with higher costs, with a payment calculated on peak years, and with a state that mandated the damage and then walked away from the repair.

This is not the same as a business that simply failed. This is a business the government ordered closed, restricted, and frightened, then handed a loan based on the last good years and a repayment clock that assumes those years never ended.

It feels like 2008 all over again — credit extended against a reality that no longer existed, then surprise that people cannot pay.

California did this to small businesses. Not a virus alone. State policy. Capacity limits. Mandates. The message that social gathering was dangerous. Then a federal loan product that treated 2018 and 2019 as if they were still on the books.

I am still open. I still teach. I still make good-faith payments I can actually afford. I have written thousands of letters because the alternative I was offered is to disappear. That should not be the choice.

If the state can close you for 58 weeks, it should not get to pretend the bill is the same as if it never did.

Regret? Governor, I sure hope so. Better late than never.

Tina Marie Schneider is the owner of Spin 360 Core Fitness in Glendora, Calif.

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