39 “The Day The Music Died…”

Friday March 13th, 2020 – this is the date scribbled across a sticky note I found last year lost in my pencil case. I was fourteen years old at the time, in the middle of ninth grade, and I had just made my school’s soccer team; little did I know I would never play again. Hours later, my family and I were driving to New York City to visit family we had not seen in years. My mother’s phone went off, alerting her to the immediate lockdown of the city as well as warning of the border closures. We were one hour away from Manhattan when we turned the car around to race back to the Canadian borders as the world began to seemingly shut down around us. The cousins I had not seen in over a year would not be seen for an additional three due to the declaration by the World Health Organization officially recognizing the pandemic of

COVID-19.

Five years later, I pinpoint that time in my life as the beginning of the end of my childlike innocence and naivety to the real world as it collapsed around me, perpetuating a virtual existence with no restrictions or filters – all for the worse. My entire life seemed to lose all structure and sense; it was flipped upside down into a realm of what could not be done online, and exposed me to a range of uncensored politics, history, and culture that I now study today for a degree. The stigmatic influence of social media or gen-z popular identity would ultimately play a role in the loss I feel now. I mourned the end of my childhood, and everywhere I looked was bad news. Virtual schooling was asynchronous and had zero structure or meetings for the first year, leaving me feeling like nothing was real, and we were all just interacting with a computer for months at our own will. It became increasingly hard to make any sense of time, remember days or self-care. Days turned into weeks into months into years of not interacting with another soul outside my house. I knew it then, but with more time passing it becomes more apparent just how detrimental this setup was to people my age – especially with the increased use of and dependence on social media. It feels as if we are all living in secrecy, perpetuated by the stigma and influence of the media. 

I began to write every single day, dated and numbered with the days I had been quarantined. I still have these papers today – stored in several notebooks, scrap pieces, and old newspapers with every headline that scared me so much I made a timeline to make sense of it all in a huge box under my desk back home. Maybe it was the fact that I was barely fifteen, young and extremely impressionable, when I watched as George Floyd was murdered by the police in a clip that no longer exists. I could feel the cultural shift in the world, in my attitude, in my awareness, and in my helplessness. The Black Lives Matter movement was something that I closely followed – reading articles, eyeing the news constantly, and watching the photos emerge from all over the world in constant breaking news. I vividly remember seeing a picture of protesters in France as they lit several governmental buildings on fire with missiles and thinking this was the end of it all. Around this time, I began to take a closer look into US politics, and their discourse. I became obsessed with understanding the functionalities and loopholes of politics and the Electoral College system in America. I closely tracked the 2020 election on a tab beside my Teams calls for school each day. During a class Teams call my English teacher started live-streaming the insurrection riot on the US Capitol on January 6th. I will never forget the chaos of that day. 

My fascination and determination to understand the law, mostly so that I would not be screwed over by a government that was so clearly cracking under immense pressure, had me taking every history, law, and politics class offered. My interest was further developed by school, but I do believe that COVID played a part in immersing me so deeply in history that I chose to pursue it in University today. Here is where I would do the most interacting with my peers in debates and controversial discussion over the things that were happening right outside our windows and talk about their greater implications for humanity. These conversations happened in isolation, with masks on and with an overlying sense of dystopian doom that had my generation thinking we were too late to do anything about the state of our world, yet we had only barely entered it. Having grown up in a more rural area, everyone knew each other and the loss of community and local resources hit hard, especially our one already run–down hospital. Students my age whispered about the business restrictions that closed down shops, mask mandates required until halfway into 2022, and the collapse of a healthcare system run into the ground. 

I was in my region’s version of lockdown for just over two years, and despite being a very introverted person by nature, it positively destroyed me. Even now as I think back, I can hardly remember feeling anything at all. Only pictures and entries in my writing allow me to remember what I was doing at all. Prior to COVID, my mental health was already rapidly declining, and the plunge into seemingly unprecedented historical times was something I do not wish to ever recall again. I did not make it to the end of the first year before I broke down completely about school, something I had always loved and was good at naturally. l was then sitting in the hospital amidst overwhelming patients in a failing healthcare system, being told I was diagnosed with MDD, GAD, ADHD, and Autism. This was a shock. I had just turned 16 and began another struggle of accepting myself for how I had always been and fighting for everyone else I knew to believe this late diagnosis – especially as a woman. This coincided with the fact that I was preparing to enter university with no experience writing exams (cancelled, during all four years) and an extreme lack of social skills, friends, and what people refer to as life-defining cultural moments. 

At nineteen years old as I write this, I am unrecognizable as a person from the child I was. I watched my family – who I used to see on a weekly basis – grow up and take their first steps via Facetime. I met my newborn cousin through a phone and saw how my relationships fell apart under the lack of contact, social interaction, and existence altogether. When things finally began to re-open, I experienced the shock of a changed society or culture requiring forms of ID and vaccination slips to access any function as well as its lack of accessibility for many. Going through several diagnoses for disabilities I had had all my life and only coming to terms with them would then ruin my mental health, self-image and confidence, bringing out my hardest time in school that reaps benefits to the day. For the first time, I analyzed the lyrics to the popular song “American Pie,” drawing connections to my own experience as a teenager witnessing the world fall apart, forever memorialized in a date as I experienced the inevitability of tragedy and loss amongst the eerie silence the historic day the world shut down.