52 Growing Up in a Pandemic: A Personal Reflection on COVID-19

When COVID-19 first began to really take off in March of 2020, I was just 16 years old, finishing my second semester of grade 11 in high school. Although I’m now turning 22 and finishing up my third year of university, I can still remember much of the pandemic as though it was yesterday. Having been born and raised in Hamilton, I spent most of my time during COVID here, although occasionally my family would take trips up north in Ontario during summer breaks if there were no stringent lockdown regulations in place.

The pandemic took place over several years, especially impacting life from March 2020 to around late 2021. Throughout this time, as with the spread of COVID-19 itself, there were periods where the lockdowns and isolation were more intense, and periods where a sense of normalcy to life almost revealed itself again, or so it felt. My family and I heavily isolated ourselves from others at the very beginning of the pandemic. We spent much of our time together and seeing a few other people – I even had a boyfriend at this time who I wasn’t able to see for several months in person because of the fear of catching COVID. By around the summer of 2020, things felt to be returning to normal, and although I started grade 12 that fall in a ‘cohort system’ (doing one class at a time instead of five), things felt to be improving.

Much of the rest of 2020 and into 2021 was a blur for me, but I do know that by the winter of 2021, the pandemic was probably the worst it had ever been – largely due to the spread of the Omicron variant of the virus. It was at this time that I actually got COVID (4 days before Christmas), most likely through a sick co-worker at my job. Luckily, I was able to fight off the virus well, probably since I had gotten both vaccination shots by this point and recovered within about a week and a half. Throughout my sickness, my family and I had isolated in our home together, since I had come into contact with them before I had started displaying serious symptoms, not knowing that I had COVID. We all spent time together in our home, wearing masks of course, as we assumed that they had all gotten COVID from me already. Although looking back, this may not have been the smartest idea. Surprisingly, I didn’t actually end up giving COVID to anyone in my family over the course of that week, as they all tested negative at the official testing center by the end of our ten days of ‘family isolation’. Despite a speedy recovery from any serious, acute symptoms, I actually lost my sense of smell for several months, and as a result, got really paranoid about catching COVID again. This led me to be much more cautious over the remaining course of the pandemic.

My experience with COVID was placed at a really unique time in my life. I spent a significant chunk of my adolescent, formative years living through lockdowns, dealing with the emergence of new COVID variants, and checking the COVID-19 case count tracker that used to pop-up whenever you’d search “COVID” on Google. The person who left the pandemic was wildly different, I feel, from the person who entered it. Due to the pandemic’s timing in my life, I actually missed out on quite a lot. I never got to attend prom, I got a YouTube graduation slideshow as opposed to a real ceremony, and I would have had a fully virtual first year of university had I not decided to drop out of engineering a week in and take a gap year instead. Although the pandemic dramatically altered the second half of my high school experience, and I missed out on a lot, I wouldn’t say the experience was horrible altogether. I got to spend almost every day outdoors and felt very little stress throughout the final years of my secondary education – something that most people probably can’t say about themselves.

I also think COVID had a really large, tangible impact on people’s mental health. Personally, I’m very introverted, so I didn’t mind the extra alone time, but for many people, the experience of isolation felt very, well, isolating. Being removed from social connection with almost all other people had a very detrimental impact on the mental health of a lot of people. Something as simple as ordering a coffee, for example, couldn’t be done without first having proof of vaccination, and then wearing a mask, standing six-feet away from the person in front of and behind you, talking to someone through a plastic screen, and limiting the conversation to not spread COVID. A social interaction so simple and taken for granted, that most wouldn’t bat an eyelash at pre-COVID, suddenly felt like an isolating obstacle course.

Although COVID was definitely an isolating experience for many, I feel that the general conversation about mental health has shifted dramatically after the pandemic. Since so many people felt this sense of isolation, and the negative mental health impacts that came alongside it, the conversation about mental health has become much more normalized, and more support is available for those in need of it. Despite causing issues in this sense, COVID also seems to have catalyzed public health officials to take issues of mental health more seriously, and for the general public to be more understanding of them.

A course theme that I think relates really well to the COVID-19 pandemic would be stigma. For me, the idea of stigma relates to COVID-19 based on personal experiences which I had. After having gotten over COVID, it felt as though that experience was something I should exclude from conversations with others. Mentioning that I had previously had COVID, even once I’d tested negative on multiple occasions, seemed to strike a dramatic shift in those who I talked to. People seemed to react to that life experience of mine with a sense of discomfort, almost creating a sense of shame in me for an experience over which I had no control. I couldn’t count how many times people’s body language and tone shifted after the topic came up in conversation, or how many times my co-workers went out of their way to avoid me after I came back to work, following my longer-than-required isolation and time off work. In this sense, COVID seemed to be a source of stigma in my personal life, often changing people’s perceptions of me based on a life experience I didn’t choose to go through.