30 COVID-19 Paranoia (or How the Cops Showed up to my Sweet Sixteen)

When COVID started 5 years ago, I was 15. In the middle of my high school days, living with my parents and my older brother in Guelph, Ontario. It was in the middle of my tenth grade year, the trivia team from my high school I was on was about to go to nationals, my first ever collegiate rowing season was gearing up to start, I was going on a trip to New York in a couple of days, and I was editing a movie with my friends to submit to a competition – when all of a sudden, BAM. No friends, no school, no grade changes in Ontario, no more rowing, just home. Our lives changed forever, and COVID was the predominant theme in my life for the next two and a half years, the rest of my high school career.

I loved my home, so staying inside wasn’t painful or traumatic so much as it was mundane. I completed over a dozen 1000-piece puzzles and I watched every single episode of Grey’s Anatomy sitting on the orange couch in my living room across from my brother. But for about two months, life as we knew it totally changed. Every day became the exact same. After the initial scare of an ominous “deadly flu” that might wipe away our family, frustration set in. People under the age of 30 weren’t dying in droves, so why did we have to stay inside? Ontario had strict gathering limits; in May, the limit was 7 people per gathering. My neighbourhood friends started getting together for socially distanced walks. I would bring a blanket and sit in the bushes of my best friend’s yard as we chatted about books we were reading and what we thought about the world.

It was a few months into lockdown when my 16th birthday rolled around. No one had been really anywhere in two months, so I invited a few friends over in the evening to my front lawn to hang out. We all sat 6 feet apart, we wore masks, and we handed out slices of ice cream cake. This was easily the most exciting thing to happen on our block, and as we hung out, parents and neighbours started coming by to say hello. Before long we had a downright rager (11 people including my neighbours dog). About an hour in, we spotted my next-door neighbours peering out of their doorway at us. Now, these neighbours were known to have bylaw on speed-dial. They certainly saw themselves as the righteous upholders of the letter of Ontario Bylaw, and at this time, our socially distanced gathering was clearly bothering this couple. A few minutes later, a sheepish bylaw officer came by and rolled down his window. My more fearful friends grabbed their lawn chairs and ran home, picnic blankets trailing behind them. The officer was clearly embarrassed to be there and to be having to tell us to disperse. He said he wouldn’t have come by, but someone had called three times about the house. He said that because we were in the front yard, he had to tell us to leave, but if we were in the backyard, he wouldn’t have bothered. Apparently, he could have fined us $1000 but just settled on asking us to leave. Two weeks later, they expanded the gathering limit to 15 people. 

There was a certain stigma around COVID. The idea persisted that there was some moral high ground in obeying the exact bylaws. But also, there was an idea that people had some duty to call out their neighbours and pass judgment over members of the community based on how they interpreted the COVID regulations. In my opinion, we were doing nothing wrong. No one in the group was sick, we were socially distanced, outside, in public – which somehow felt less illicit than a hidden gathering – and yet my neighbours still felt the need to involve law enforcement on my 16th birthday. It’s interesting that rather than coming out and asking us to move into our backyard, or just leave, they chose to call the police, an option that for me would be a last resort. People talk about what they would do in Nazi Germany, would they turn neighbours in for disobeying the law, or would they be guided by empathy. I think on a much smaller scale, this was revealed during COVID. You saw the people who believed every single word the government said without discretion, as well as those who thought critically about what doctors were saying about the disease and how it compared to policy. On the opposite spectrum, we had people reacting violently to misinformation, resorting to fear and ignorance guiding their actions. In many ways the radical anti-vax movement was a parallel to the terrified triple masked paranoid individuals who developed agoraphobia during COVID. I choose to think that when we lose the ability to listen to our neighbours and follow blindly any single rhetoric is when things go south (metaphorically).   

COVID also showed me a lot about how the people you know react to crises. The first few months were tough for me personally. I was incredibly busy in the winter of 2020, and then all of a sudden, I had nothing to do and no responsibilities. It took me months to figure out how to function again. Around Christmas of 2020, I volunteered at the Food Bank for the first time. The next year, I went for an hour and a half twice a week after school. The sense of purpose, the calming walk from my house to the Guelph Food Bank, and my few volunteer friends were probably the best thing that could have happened to me. At a time, I felt completely directionless; going to the food bank gave me purpose. It seems silly to say, but in many ways this experience was life-changing for me. It felt almost like church, going every week, sweeping floors, organizing shelves, packing food baskets; it became my religion. That point was a big shift for me, the point when I decided to keep doing instead of letting myself get bored. So for me, my desire to keep active, no matter what was happening in the world, gave me the confidence to adapt to the new COVID world. 

I had friends who weren’t so lucky. I watched my best friend spiral down a paranoid shame spiral fuelled by so called “COVID-guilt”. Suddenly, those times we’d gone swimming last summer were “bad,” we shouldn’t be seeing each other at all, even if the government has released the lockdown. I saw how the lockdown rhetoric couldn’t be so easily removed from her mind. I think that she internalized this long after COVID was a threat. Towards June of 2022, my friend had a bad mental breakdown and never came back to high school. She has had serious mental health issues ever since. Needless to say, COVID alone was not the cause of her mental health break, but as someone who was very close to her throughout that entire period, I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a major turning point in her life as well, but for the worse.

All in all, I see COVID as a test of resilience, adaptability, and human nature. It revealed the way people react to a crisis beyond their control, from conscious resilience, to blind obedience, and even worse, internalized anxiety. For me, it was a period of growth and a test of my ability to shift my perspective. But not everyone had the same experience. I realize that COVID didn’t just change our world for two and a half years—it reshaped the way we see each other, the way we judge, and the way we choose to move on.