25 Covid-19 Gave me Too much Free Time
Anonymous
During Covid, I was 16 years old in Richmond Hill, Ontario, halfway through 10th grade. Because I was in my sophomore year of high school, I was very dependent on my parents and still lived with them. As a result, their protocol to on Covid was what I followed. Our family did follow strict lockdown precautions. This included mask wearing, sanitation after coming indoors, sanitation of groceries, and avoiding contact with people outside of our family. These precautions were standard day– to–day tasks for at least 6 months. My form of communication with my friends became strictly digital, and this resulted in long hours in front of my computer calling my friends. When the government started to ease up on quarantine regulation, more information regarding on Covid transmission routes was released, and the first round of vaccinations, our family became more lenient on our lockdown procedures. Masks and daily sanitations were still a part of our lives, but I was able to visit my friends and interact with people in person. Personally, my day-to-day changes compared to pre-Covid was the freeing up of a significant amount of time – time that I would usually spend commuting, time between classes, and lunches was all freed up, allowing me to do many activities which previously I had less time for.
Looking back, my greatest challenge was my screen time and my sedentary lifestyle. The excess amount of screen time combined with my teenage drive to consume borderline unhealthy amounts of digital media created an association with my digital devices I still struggle to contain to this day. The sudden freeing of multiple hours allowed me to delegate hours of my time to consuming media and playing video games. However, I still do not regret any of this. Looking back now, I could say to myself that I should have been learning lucrative skills such as programming, mechanical projects, learning about stock markets, e-commerce; but I still believe that it was during these years I had some of the most fun with my friends that I do not get to interact with today due to physical distance and time constraints.
Something good that came out of COVID was the beginning of my personal cooking skills. Being at home nearly every hour of the day, I had the freedom to experiment with cooking at home for myself. Today, I pride myself on being able to cook pretty large meals in under 30 minutes, and I can attribute this to Covid giving me the time and necessity to cook for myself. Another good event that came out of Covid was a decision my family made at the start of the lockdown. We adopted a golden retriever puppy, and it is because of her that I believe I was about to get through some stints of boredom as a result of the quarantine.
Something that I missed out on because of Covid was my senior year of high school. At the time when Covid started for me, I was in grade 10. Before the lockdown, my friends and I would wish for the days of being a senior because of the freedom we would have. This included free periods, less strain from teachers, and prospective planning for university programs. Unknowingly, we would all get the free time we wished for, but in reality I think it was Covid that made us realize that we just wanted more opportunities to hang out together in person. Though Covid gave all of us much time for ourselves, I still would have preferred school in person.
Holistically, my Covid experience was relatively monotonous from start to end. However, there were experiences that I heard about or directly encountered myself. From my Asian-Canadian friends and my parents, I would hear stories of sinophobic actions being committed against their family and friends. These activities ranged from just disapproving glares to physical and verbal altercations such as shoving or slurs being yelled. Additionally, a large portion of these sinophobic incidents were incurred towards the elderly population. In Chinese culture, the elderly population is significantly respected; thus when stories of sinophobic altercations such as verbal and physical abuse were circulated on social media and by word of mouth, this generated much anger in the Chinese population. Thinking back to past pandemics, the presence of stigma for a certain population was present in some form or another. In the Black Death, the Jews were blamed and were even expelled from some communities as a result. In the case of COVID-19 the Chinese population was stigmatized because the disease outbreak was in China. I only had one instance where I was stigmatized as a result of the pandemic. It was towards the tail end of the global pandemic and the quarantine was beginning to lift, so my family and others went for a day ski trip. At the time, I was 17 and still in high school. I was walking in the ski chalet and passed by a group of post-secondary Caucasian males. One of them purposely stepped out and bumped into me, while coughing seemingly out of nowhere. At that moment I was scared and just walked off, listening to the group laugh behind me. Though nothing physical or emotional was afflicted on me, looking back I realize that group of guys felt that I was lower than them to some degree, warranting a mockery of me. The stigmatization of Chinese populations creates blame and as a result, some people choose to vent their frustrations with the pandemic on that stigmatized population.
