90 The Multicultural View Of Stigma Around COVID And The Fourteen Year Old Lock Down Mind

Every person I know went through a wide range of challenges and problems during COVID-19. As an immigrant child, I had the experience of seeing how COVID-19 affected people in my life both in Coquitlam, Canada and Tehran, Iran. When COVID-19 hit in 2020, I was 14 and in the 9th grade. This was about 3/4 years after I had moved from Iran to Canada. This mostly meant that I was still adjusting to the environment in Canada and had a lot of contact with my family at home. One thing about my family in Iran was that there was a lot of blame going around as the entire country was uprooted by the events of COVID-19. Unlike Canada, Iran was not as strict in their lockdown rules and preventative methods leading to a lot more people getting sick and unfortunately passing from COVID-19. Due to the heavy destruction experienced in Iran and the propaganda propelled by the government, the people of the country placed all the blame on China and its citizens. Iran, like many of the countries in the area, suffers from a lot of miseducated and deeply rooted racism. At the time the unproven rumors about the origin of COVID-19 being from a “bat soup” led to a lot of racism and blame being thrown around by people in Iran. This theme was also apparent in people I knew in Canada. However, the extent of the blame was not as severe in Canada as it was in Iran. How this affected my experience of COVID-19 was how people around me described it to the 14-year-old me. I kept hearing from people around me, especially back in Iran, about who to blame for my situation of having to stay at home. These beliefs started to influence my understanding at the time. I once mentioned something I had heard from my cousin on the topic to my parents. Luckily my parents did not buy into the common racist scare tactics going around at the time. They explained to me how the racist, erroneous beliefs going around at the time were wrong. Even though I was lucky to have good influences, this was a firsthand experience I had around all the blame and stigma that came with COVID-19.

My COVID experience overall was terrible as the physical duress of lockdown was very severe for me. I had to go into full lockdown for grade 9 and part of grade 10. The lockdown during grade 9 was very impactful on my health outside of school. For context, at the time I only played aquatic sports – mainly swimming. During the full lockdown, the closure of pools had a huge impact on my health as it forced me to transition from swimming about 6-7 times a week to a much more dormant lifestyle. Since I am an aquatic athlete, most land-based workouts that I could have done at home did not translate well to my sport. This caused an even greater toll on my physical health. The lack of exercise left a major mark on my weight and mental health. This further led to me losing contact with a lot of friends as I wasn’t seeing them at practice or school anymore. As a result of the very sharp drop in exercise and social interactions, I found myself in a very bleak and dreary state of my life. I believe that I was one of the worst cases affected by the lockdown of people around me. I depended a lot on my social life and exercise to transition to my time in Canada. Being cut off from two of the most important portions of my life led to me experiencing a very taxing lockdown. Even though I believe I was one of the worst cases in my circle, I know a lot of people my age and around me suffered a lot from this lockdown. However, I remember that at first, my friends and I were ecstatic about our time off from school. What 14-year-old doesn’t idealize staying at home all day, playing video games, and not caring about school? I do not think that any of us truly expected the effects of lockdown. The mental health toll on youth was vast for a multitude of reasons. This ranged from lack of exercise, less social interaction, anxiety about the pandemic, to affected family and friends. Some of my friends, however, found a lot of productivity in their time away from school. They exercised more, spent more time on their hobbies, and a lot of them began proper self-care. However, such cases were very rare, and the mental health of the greater majority declined heavily. This was reflected in the excitement that we all shared once the lockdown ended, and we returned to school. I hadn’t truly realized how much my mental health depended on the friends that I saw every day and the practices that I went to. COVID-19 caused a lot of hardship, death, and general calamity for everyone – yet there is a lot of good that it did for me. I believe that after it was over, my experience allowed me to truly reflect on my activities and behaviors. It helped me understand what was important to me in life and how to avoid going back to the same state of mind.