31 The Covid-19 Pandemic Through My Eyes

Isabella

I was in my house in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada with my family during the entire  covid pandemic. I believe I was 14 and it was about the beginning to middle part of my second semester of grade ten in high school. 

My memory of the entire covid experience is hazy, where looking back even now it doesn’t even feel like it was real. All the days blurred together and seem now like a dream. I mainly remember the feelings of fear, confusion, and intense boredom during the lockdown. At the beginning of covid, I recall going to school and being told that we would not be coming back to school for two weeks after the March break and to wait until given further notice about the progression of the pandemic. Two weeks then turned into three, then four, and then a month. At the one month mark I believe we were in full lockdown, where we were advised to avoid close contact with anyone outside our household, and to avoid outings. My high school informed us that we would be moving to being strictly online. That wasn’t implemented for a while though, and when it finally did start up, classes were on Zoom with numerous technical difficulties. Assessments and tests were never the same. It was much harder for me to focus with the noise happening in the house and I couldn’t be completely engaged. Attending class five times a week used to be my time for socializing and connecting with others, but online, everyone would just leave immediately after the teacher was done talking. Everything felt very impersonal and foreign.  

When I finally went back to in person school in late 11th grade, wearing a mask at all times made things feel surreal. At the height of covid, since I also had a lot of friends whose grandparents lived with them, none of us wanted to put them at risk, and so we wouldn’t see each other for weeks.  

In terms of my family, I know it was also hard for them, and daily tasks/ weekly tasks become much more troublesome, even after restrictions got lighter. For example, my mom would often come home upset after trying to go grocery shopping because there was so little toilet paper, or even Lysol. For me, daily activities either became impossible to do or so much harder. I couldn’t go to the gym for a long time, for example, so I had to find a way to work out in the house. Staying active and healthy was a bit more difficult when lockdown was full force. Other things like getting haircuts, celebrating birthdays, going to dinners, or going to the mall were also significantly harder due to capacity limits. When restrictions on going outside and meetings in general lightened up after about 4.5 months of lockdown, I went outside more. Gradually people around me stopped wearing masks, and life somewhat returned to “normal”, but I don’t think it ever went back to the way it was before covid-19.  

I believe covid changed many people my age, some for the better and some for the worse. Personally, my mental health was on the decline without much social interaction and being so incredibly bored most days. It felt like every day was the same, and there was this fear that it would never change. I was not depressed during the first month of the pandemic as I was just happy to get a break from school and do nothing all day. But at some point, that became repetitive, and being confined to a house with my family for weeks strained our relationship. There was no way to get proper space from them, and because I was a growing, hormonal teenager, it led to a lot more chances for arguments and conflict. I know my friends experienced a similar strain with their families, especially when they did not have the best relationship with their families in the first place.  

On top of feeling isolated yet stuck, I know covid took the lives of many loved ones. It was difficult to see my friends mourn the loss of family they had in a different country. For me, the hardest was hearing of my aunt’s death from a combination of covid and cancer. I couldn’t go see her when she was sick as she was in Mexico, and my family couldn’t attend her funeral or go see the rest of the family. It was a really hard time, and I’ve had many friends that experienced the same thing. One of the worst things about covid I would say is the isolation from important people in our lives. Whenever I speak to someone my age about covid they all seem to say the same thing, that it’s a blur. I believe the quarantine and pandemic itself impacted us heavily and still does to this day. No one will forget the people they lost during covid, and the isolating feeling of living behind a screen. I think that the long periods of time I and others my age went without in- person socialization at such a critical age impacted our self-esteem, communication skills, and ultimately our mental health. 

Throughout this course, we have discussed numerous diseases spanning from hundreds of years ago to more recent. In the more widespread ones, there is a common theme of fear, but more specifically blame and stigma like with, for example, HIV/AIDS. Just as how a single community was singled out as the “cause” of HIV/AIDs, East Asians specifically were blamed for covid. I remember going on social media frequently all throughout the pandemic, especially during the intense lockdowns where we were advised to not even leave the house if possible. My main platform was TikTok, and I would doom scroll for more than an hour with not much else to do. The comments under videos both related to and unrelated to covid were vicious. If someone appeared to be Chinese, Korean, or generally east Asian, they would face intense racism. I would read comments attacking them for their culture and saying they were disgusting. The way western society treated East Asians shifted, where even people in school would make jokes to their east Asian friends about not wanting to get close to them after the lockdown was over. There was this assumption by so many people that somehow all east Asians were a threat and had covid-19. okes labelled “dark humor” further pushed this belief. It made no sense to me, however, as numerous east Asian countries have preventative measures such as more commonly wearing masks when feeling under the weather, which the western world did not see much of. Many of the people targeted by racism and blamed were also born in this country. Regardless of where they were born, everyone was scared and facing the same isolation. Just as with pandemics of the past, this stereotyping and stigmatization of east Asian people and their culture in general is just another example of blame driven by fear and misinformation.