89 My Sweet Sixteen (Covid Edition!)

A. Lepik

When the Covid-19 pandemic started to gain traction and concern in Canada, I was living in downtown Toronto with my parents but transiting to Etobicoke daily to attend my high school. The 10th grade was a plethora of Shakespearean plays, gossip, dissecting frogs, and intense after school rehearsals at Etobicoke School of the Arts. This daily social dynamic was a luxury to students by the time of my graduation in 2022. In March of 2020, I was fifteen and looking forward to another annual semi-formal dance, but like everyone’s plans for the considerable future, they were first rescheduled, then cancelled and lost to the abyss of 2020-2021 until the world, or more specifically, the city was ready to reopen. Due to the city’s expansive size and massive population, the effects of the outbreak were felt in every facet of the lives of Torontonians. What first seemed like just an extended March break rapidly became an isolated reality that spanned across my sophomore and junior years of high school.  

The pandemic forced everyone in the city to recede into their homes and unsurprisingly, my family was no exception to the rules that came with the country’s declared state of emergency. Through March and April, I saw absolutely no-one outside of my immediate family and caught glimpses of the other people who lived in my parents’ condominium. During the first stretch of the lockdown, calling various friends for endless hours on facetime was an everyday occurrence. Sites like Netflix Party quickly gained popularity within my friend group, allowing us to connect remotely while enjoying television shows like Outer Banks and Stranger Things. Online schooling was still relatively new for both students and teachers, leading to unorganized and altered versions of our curriculum being tackled within 50-minute Zoom sessions. In the early portion of the pandemic, school somehow felt optional to most of us and luckily our grades barely reflected this due to the last-minute switch to online and a general understanding that marks from earlier in the year would take precedence. My mother made sure we didn’t turn completely into hermits by arranging family walks and other activities that kept me out of the bedroom. After every excursion outside, whether going to the grocery store or simply taking out the dog, hands were washed, and phones were sprayed down with a pungent disinfectant.

My family was lucky enough to avoid any severe illness throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. Those I knew who contracted the virus were also fortunate in their mild symptoms and relatively quick recovery. Access to vaccinations and subsequent healthcare in 2021 gave Canadians a privilege of looking upon the pandemic with a more indifferent perspective on its effects than others in different demographics. Despite this ability to look back upon the pandemic with rose coloured glasses, I do feel a strong sense of resentment towards Covid-19, the lockdown, and the isolation that ensued. I missed celebrating both my sixteenth and seventeenth birthdays due to the restrictions brought on by the pandemic. That last sentence is a little bit dramatic, as I was able to be with my family, enjoy a cake of my choosing, and unwrap a gift that I’d probably begged my mother for months earlier. It was the lack of connection outside of my immediate family (who I’d been quarantining with for the last several months) that stung the hardest on my ‘sweet sixteenth.’ The night ended up looking considerably different and lonelier than I had been picturing for the couple previous years. I lost out on my final years at my beloved overnight summer camp; another loss that seems ultimately trivial but felt earth shattering at the time of the confirmed cancellation. Culturally important rights of passage that epitomize the teenage experience were denied to those of us who had to experience instrumental chunks of our teenagerhood inside and secluded from our