69 Lessons and Losses of Covid Times

Grace Kim

I remember first hearing about COVID-19 in December of 2019, from one of my friends. He mentioned it offhandedly, while it lived in my brain for the next couple of months, I didn’t think that it would have any impact on my life. I carried on, doing my homework, going to swim practice, and fighting with my brother, until March 12, 2020, when it was announced that schools in my board would be closed for two weeks. That’s the moment crystallized in my mind as the one where everything changed. I can remember exactly where I was standing in my house when I found out (the dining room, left side), and I can still see the notification on the phone in my hand. It was a moment that felt huge at the time, and even then, I didn’t know that it would change my life and the world so spectacularly. 

I spent the bulk of COVID-19 times in my house in London, Ontario, with my parents and my brother. It began when I was in grade 10 (in 2020), when I was 15. I turned 16 in the pandemic (later in 2020), then 17. My birthday is late in the year, so there were always peak restrictions at the time. For 16, I remember my parents putting together a bunch of videos from family and friends wishing me happy birthday, since we couldn’t gather at all. I don’t even remember my 17th birthday (there’s something tricky about pandemic memories), but I imagine no one was around for it, because, again, restrictions. By the time I turned 18, I was in a new town, living in university residence, and it felt like society had already forgotten about COVID-19. I celebrated by going out for dinner with new friends, and I marveled at being allowed to do so (of course, it’s not that covid was gone by then, it’s just that society seemed to suddenly act that way). 

For the first two months of COVID-19 (mid-March to mid-May, 2020), I was pretty solidly in lockdown. I only saw the three people living in my house and maybe a neighbour, across the street, on my daily walk. School was online, but in my board, everything was asynchronous for the rest of the year, so I completed tenth grade without even seeing my classmates on Zoom. I played a lot of video games with my brother, I went on long runs on the treadmill, and I tried not to fight with my mom too much. I’ve never been the kind of person who was good at staying still, nor the kind who loves being at home, so with the sudden lack of school, swim practices, volunteering at the pool, and trips to the mall with my friends, I was restless.  

However, the thing with my family is that we weren’t nearly as isolated as many others. My dad is a doctor, and he worked through the whole pandemic. His office never closed, and he saw people with COVID-19 from the very beginning. So, a big part of my life became the accommodations my family had to make so that my dad could keep helping. We dropped lunch off at his office door every day, we washed all his work clothes separately, and we tried, often unsuccessfully, to find PPE for him to wear to work (there was a shortage at the beginning of the pandemic). For the first little while, I couldn’t hug him at all, because we didn’t know how the virus functioned. There were all the emotions of having to stay home and face the unknowns, but there was also, first and most difficult, the fear for my dad.  

That fear ties into a course theme that was a big part of my COVID-19 experience: stigma. East Asian hate multiplied over the course of the pandemic due to the virus originating in China and lots of misconstructions of its exact source. I’m half Korean, so the Asian hate hit close to home. I remember reading the news stories of attacks on elderly Asian people and fearing for my Korean grandparents. As far as I know, they never experienced anything more than usual during the pandemic, but it was something that was on my mind. The stigma surrounding the disease and East Asian people during the COVID-19 pandemic was a scary addition to an already stressful situation. Taking it a step farther, my dad, who was out every day for work, is Korean. I was always scared for him, too, and that fear only got magnified as the anti-mask/anti-vax movement got more aggressive. I remember thinking that my dad had three strikes against him: Asian, a doctor, and out in public. For him, there was no hiding from the violent ways that society dealt with the stigma and stereotypes, and there was no escaping the blame that people were so eager to place on him and people like him. However, he never shied away from it, and I will always carry that example of bravery with me.

For all the many difficulties and fears that COVID-19 brought, I think that my biggest challenge was my own brain in the absence of my routine. I was someone who had never really stood still, and suddenly that’s all I was doing. Until then, I had built my life that way because if I never stopped, then I never had time to think about things too hard. There were certainly many corners of my brain that I had no interest in examining, but suddenly thinking about those things was the only thing to do. Adding to that all the new stressors of the pandemic, I lost my ability to cope. The worst part of it all was that there was very little I could do to remove the stressors from my life. I couldn’t stop the pandemic, I couldn’t stop worrying about getting sick, and I couldn’t stop my fear. There was nothing I could do to get my old routine back; I was stuck. So, I spiraled. My greatest challenge was making it through that.  

However, on the flip side, something good that came out of the whole experience is that I did make it through. It was really difficult to face the things in my mind, but it was also entirely necessary. All my restless energy went into journalling and other creative pursuits. I found myself making extensive vision boards and actually figuring out the things I wanted from my life. I faced the difficult corners of my mind and learned healthier coping strategies. I don’t like to attach the adage of ‘everything happens for a reason’ to something that was as terribly destructive as the COVID-19 pandemic, but I do look back on the experience with an amount of gratitude. I heard the saying once, that ‘the pain wasn’t worth it, but it also wasn’t wasted,’ and I think that captures my feelings about covid very well. There was a lot of pain, and while I’d never say it was worth it, I do know that I got a lot from it.