68 Learning to Live in Isolation

Anonymous

At the time COVID-19 broke out, I was physically at home in Oakville, just outside Toronto in the GTA. I remember sitting in the hallways of my high school at the time and seeing the news on social media of school closures. Health officials promised a short 2–week break, and everyone was elated. I was in grade 9 at the time, 15 years old. When 2–weeks turned into a month, then indefinitely, I stayed at home with my family, split between both of my parent’s homes. With a house of 9 people, full of 3 familial generations and stepsiblings, it all started out like a long vacation, until it wasn’t.  

My COVID-19 experience was unique in that I probably exposed myself to many more chances of getting sick than most. Every week, I switched over to live in my other parent’s home, and so did all three of my stepsiblings, except they went back and forth between Oakville and Etobicoke. In the beginning, most likely due to all the uncertainties and fears, my dad began to amass a stockpile of food in our cellar for emergencies, he liked to call it the ‘apocalypse stockpile.’ His decision to do this followed on the coattails of a sentiment at the time, which was essentially to stock up on as much toilet paper and food as possible. Living in our home of 9 people, this stockpile really added up quickly, but for some reason this never worried any of us 6 kids. We were too preoccupied slacking off on our online classes held asynchronously at the time. Because we didn’t leave home for the first 6 months, not even to parks or to walk far from the neighbourhood, things started to feel a lot less like a vacation, and a lot more like confinement. Instead of going to school, we stayed inside and mostly in our rooms, everyone doing their respective work, including parents, separately. We didn’t go out to get groceries, rather got them delivered, and wiped everything down with Lysol at the door. Masks weren’t even all too popular at this time because no one left the house long or far enough to need them. But mostly, the biggest change that occurred was learning to deal with constant familial presence at an age when I just wanted to be out with my friends.  

Unlike most people I talk to today, I kind of enjoyed virtual schooling for a while. At first, we had to self-pace ourselves through classes, mostly completing weekly assignments or check-ins to ensure completion of work. They called this asynchronous learning. This type of learning I was good at. I remember keeping my schedule like usual. I woke up as if I was going to school and did the work I needed to for a given class during the day. However, for the next 2 years, learning models never remained as consistent as those first six months. In grade 10, half the year was split between synchronous in-person and virtual classes, the other half fully virtual. In grade 11, we had a ‘quadmester’ model where we only did 2 classes at a time for a shortened period, sometimes fully virtual and sometimes in-person. Given the constantly changing health guidelines and spikes in COVID-19, we never really knew what our schooling would look like. I think this contributed greatly to the struggles myself and my peers share from this time. The uncertainty of school caused a roller coaster of emotions where one day you were elated you were returning to school and could finally be social, and the next you were back in your room alone, staring back at people’s icons in virtual class. For me at least, all that back and forth really grew a hatred for any kind of online classes or modules. Now, whenever I have a choice between taking a class online or walking across campus to a night class, I’m probably going to pick that 3–hour night lecture instead. 

After COVID-19 had calmed down, and even towards the tail-end of the pandemic, there began to be a lot more resistance to vaccination, government intervention for health purposes, and just the scientific process in general. With the rise of social media platforms like TikTok occurring almost alongside the pandemic, we could see this rise in misinformation regarding previously accepted scientific information quite clearly. I see this trend continue up to this day, in 2025, where it seems increasingly acceptable for individuals to completely discredit medical advice and vaccination protocols for an opinion they’ve heard online. Additionally, during the pandemic we had to learn to rely on a lot of new services that operated on providing as little person-to-person contact as possible in an effort to stop the spread of the virus. So, I feel as though some elements of my life haven’t really deviated from that previous norm. People seem to order their groceries a lot more, or even exclusively in my house, rather than physically going to the store. You can access medical services and take therapy appointments all from the comfort of your home on Zoom. These were never the norm before the pandemic, they all were exceptions. I believe the pandemic has fundamentally changed the way we interact as humans for this reason, as it has attuned us to a life where we make as little contact with other people as possible.  

My COVID-19 experience can be closely tied to that of the stages of plague narratives, which describe the ways in which a society copes with a given infectious disease by constructing its narrative of the events. The phase I had the most experience with was that of public acknowledgement, most likely due to my age at the time. The socially constructed nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, that being the widespread fear, uncertainty, and unease that it created, brought about a lot of denial within many. For myself, it was easy to ignore the outside world when I could focus on virtual school and stick to a schedule all day, but it would be a lie to say there wasn’t some part of me affected mentally. Luckily, neither of my parents experienced any major job disruptions at this time, but once I could no longer ignore the stockpile of food in the basement, or my dad listening to the news of deaths in the living room, it all sunk in. This first phase of plague narrative can be characterized by a slow build of panic, where a collective alarm is raised, and I remember the few times I was at school this was evident. There would be an announcement that someone had COVID-19 in class, or someone got a cold at home, and the perfect bubble of health we’d made would shatter. Something I thought wasn’t a big deal suddenly came into view when it affected myself or my family.