77 Locked to My Desk

Anonymous

During Covid, I was enrolled at Mohawk College, in the second term of my second year. I would have in my very late teens or very early twenties. I first heard about Covid from a classmate a few days before lockdown was initiated. Most of my time was spent at a computer desk at home, but I would frequently go for walks around my neighbourhood as the lockdown continued. I spent a large chunk of lockdown at work, since it was considered an essential service.

Lockdown happened for me around halfway into March 2020. It was very much a full lockdown, with most businesses being closed outside of essential services. At the time, I had been working at Fortinos for about a year and kept my job throughout the entire pandemic. Lockdown affected our hours, as we started closing an hour earlier both during the week and on weekends. On the school side of things, classes were moved fully online, and held on Zoom video calls. Early on and especially during the school year, I was mostly confined to my room either in class or on the internet. Late classes meant that I could eat at more consistent times from day to day as I could just have a plate of food to pick at during a lecture. As the lockdown continued, however, I began to spend less time in my room, preferring to read in the living room or to sit outside during warmer weather. Boredom drove me to new hobbies and to return to old ones, leading me down the rabbit hole of plastic models and tabletop gaming, or what some might call ‘plastic crack.’

If there was one challenge that I greatly faced during Covid, it was the consequences of my preferred solitude. Outside of my family, I was unable to see any of my friends in person. I am someone who generally enjoys my own company, but I will admit that the pandemic and lockdown stressed this aspect of me to its limits as being alone felt tiring for the first time. Yet it was this boredom that led me to connecting with my friends in a different way and ignited one of my greatest hobbies, tabletop gaming. During the pandemic, I began to take an interest in Dungeons & Dragons, biting the bullet and buying the Player’s Handbook and really diving in by becoming the dungeon master for my own sessions.

Virtual schooling was much more relaxed than attending a class physically. Partially, I attribute this to being stuck at home, where I had little incentive to be up and about as I could be “in class” via my computer. However, I did notice a slight change in my studying habits, in that I felt more compelled to make sure I kept up with my assignments and readings. I didn’t have any connections with any of my classmates outside of group assignments, and even that was limited to the project. Mohawk also kept both of their campuses closed for a semester longer than other post-secondary institutions, so I spent an even longer time than most not seeing my classmates.

Something interesting that the pandemic brought was the adoption of masking during illness. While this has been a popular practice in east Asian countries, such as China and Japan, it took Covid protocols to make masking common over here in the west, especially outside of medical settings like hospitals. Speaking of hospitals, a lot of appointments one can make, whether with doctors, banks, business, or other organizations, can be done virtually. We have also seen a rise in people working either from home or using a hybrid model where they only come into the office on certain days. This is an obvious effect of the lockdown, where the health risks of meeting even in small groups could potentially spread the disease to a larger group of people.

If Covid was the cause of any strife outside of the toll it took on the body of the infected and on the emotions of the friends and family of those who passed, it certainly caused fingers to be pointed towards Asians, specifically the Chinese, due to its origins. While I personally never experienced any discrimination or accusations due to my Chinese heritage, during lockdown I did hear from my parents about a couple incidents of Chinese and more broadly Asian Canadians being attacked or harassed for their perceived fault in the pandemic. I suppose I could consider myself lucky that I avoided such harassment, but I must admit that hearing of these was the first time I’ve ever been confronted by anti-Chinese sentiment. Usually when you hear of such things it’s distant, either from the pages of history or a rare occurrence that was frequently overshadowed by forms of prejudice more popular with media outlets.