116 Two Years

Anonymous

On the week of March 9th, 2020, I was 14 years old and in grade 9. I am an only child and was living with my parents in our home in Toronto. I spent that week looking forward to a trip to New York City, which I had planned for March break with two friends I had met in my new high school that September. The friendships still felt new, and the trip, which I had spent hours begging my parents to let me go on, was supposed to solidify my friend group in high school. That was not what happened. By the Thursday of that week, the trip was cancelled, and I couldn’t ignore what the exponential curve of cases was saying. On Friday, March 13th I took the subway home, a new source of independence I had acquired since starting high school, and I changed lines at Bloor-Yonge station. I have a distinct memory of looking at the crowd of people in the subway station, thinking about each one of them pushing past each other, touching the railings, talking, exhaling, I wondered why that had ever felt safe. I asked myself when I would be in a crowd like that again and, although I didn’t know it then, I wouldn’t be for almost two years.

Under normal circumstances, I think of two years as being a long time. I have spent two years in university, for example, and I can tell that I am a different person than when I started, I have had experiences and relationships that have changed me. However, as I was living through those two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, although time seemed to drag on and on, looking back on it I remember only a fuzzy blur. It turns out that a year is stored in my mind as memories of the things I did and the people I connected with, without those experiences time felt like it jumped forward. My parents were extremely cautious throughout the pandemic; they are both scientists who were watching graphs of case rates obsessively and felt a duty to contribute to limiting the spread as much as possible. I was permitted to attend school during the brief periods that it was partially open in–person, but aside from school, I was in full lockdown from March 2020 until I was vaccinated in June 2021. Each day during lockdown was almost exactly the same, I would wake up for my online classes and lie in the bed in my basement in my pyjamas and watch Netflix shows on my laptop with a lecture playing in the background. Lunch was at exactly 12:30 every day, and I would eat a poached egg with my parents, almost always discussing the epidemiological data of the day. The rest of the afternoon was spent back in the basement half-heartedly doing schoolwork. I would sometimes call friends after class, but we often lacked things to talk about, so maintaining friendships began to feel like a chore. I walked once a day with my mother on the U of T campus for exercise (which indirectly led me to choose McMaster University over U of T when I was applying for post-secondary in grade 12). I ate dinner with my parents each night, usually still talking about the news, and afterwards, we would play a game of Boggle and watch an episode of TV. I would spend the next few hours after that on my phone until going to bed, always later than I intended. Lather, rinse, repeat for months and months. No part of the routine was unpleasant, but the monotony wore me down.

I was always an anxious kid, never fully at ease, but my anxiety was typically focused on acute phobias which would flare up and retreat periodically. It was only once the COVID-19 pandemic hit that I had my first experience of sustained poor mental health. Before living through the pandemic, I had often wished life could pause for a few months so that I could read, and craft, and focus on the hobbies that so often get abandoned during the constant rush of everyday life. Once I was living through that pause, however, I found myself too depressed and anxious to get much enjoyment out of those activities. I suddenly lacked the attention span to read and found myself much less interested in the pastimes that used to bring me joy. I also began to worry about the mental health of my friends, who would confide in me about how much they were struggling with depression and isolation, oftentimes with difficult and suddenly inescapable home lives, and I felt powerless to help them. I felt like I was missing out on the unique experience of being a teenager and high school student, a time in my life I knew I could never get back, and I worried that my friendships wouldn’t be there waiting for me when life returned to normal. Thankfully, I did not lose friends or family to the pandemic, but my mental health remained fragile for years afterwards and eventually required medication to treat. I wonder now how my daily automatic thought patterns have been shaped by my experience of living isolated from my friends, teachers, and classmates during those years.

This course has revealed to me how plague events have shaped human history. I have seen how the effects of diseases, which cause millions of deaths, are easily forgotten or ignored in the stories we tell about history. The impacts of the 1918 flu pandemic, for example, were largely overshadowed by the First World War in our historical narrative. When life returned to a kind of normal in Canada, roughly at the start of 2022, I was amazed by how little we talked about what each of us had been through during those two years. We often talk about events that shaped a generation, for example, we think of generations that witnessed 9-11 as being fundamentally different than those that did not, and I believe that the COVID-19 pandemic was a generation-defining event for all the kids and teenagers that were quarantined. I have noticed, however, that the long-term effects of the pandemic on my generation are under-discussed. At a  time in our lives when we should have been developing social skills and connections with one another, we were forced to interact through algorithm-based social media platforms. There is no doubt that we have grown into different people for having lived this way, and yet, we were all so eager to put it behind us that, like with many of the pandemics we studied this semester, I suspect that many of our experiences during that time will be forgotten.