100 The price of safety

During the covid pandemic, I went through the ages of 14 and 15. The pandemic started off during the March break of my 9th Grade, continued in its peak during my 10th Grade, and finally began to fade away by Grade 11. I spent the entire pandemic in and around my house in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.

Initially, my family and I were in full lockdown, with the expectation from the public health authorities that we would only go out for groceries and other absolute essentials. Other than that, we were expected to stay completely indoors. This expectation did not last long as, predictably, people did not like being trapped in their own homes. After a couple of months, the lockdown guidelines changed to allow people to interact in “bubbles”. A group of around 5 people could interact in person regularly, as long as each person was part of only that bubble. Restrictions like these slowly became more and more relaxed as the pandemic progressed. The lockdown introduced a large change to my day-to-day routine. Instead of having to wake up early and take the bus to school, I could sleep in until minutes before (and sometimes after) my online classes began. Instead of paying attention in class, as I would usually do under the proximity and supervision of a teacher, I could give in to my friend’s requests to play games through class. I would only interact with class when directly engaged with by the teacher when they wanted to make sure that I was paying attention. At the start of grade 9 and my high school experience, I had involved myself in a lot of extracurriculars that would take up my time after school. After my extracurriculars, I would usually spend my evenings with friends at the park near my home. After the lockdowns, my extracurriculars were cancelled and going to the park was no longer an option. Instead, I killed my free time on devices and social media. The pandemic had completely digitalized my social life outside of school.

The course theme that my experience connects back to the most is fear. In a lot of pandemics and plagues in the past, such as the Black Death, a lack of knowledge on how the disease operated dictated a lot of the actions people took, such as fleeing from an infected place to a supposedly safe one. For most of the pandemic, my family and I operated on a basis of fear of covid. There was a lot of ambiguity in how covid worked, how it was transmitted, how careful we needed to be, and how we were supposed to act. It felt like public health authorities were constantly changing what the facts were, and how covid worked. A large part of my family’s fear was for my father. He had had prior cases of pneumonia and was immunocompromised. We were certain that if he contracted covid, he would have become hospitalized and likely would have passed on. This fear meant that even when my school offered a hybrid learning style during my 10th grade, I was forced to choose to stay at home full time, missing out on social interaction with my peers in exchange for my father’s safety. Fear of covid dictated a lot of my other actions too, such as how long I would spend outside, how many people I would directly interact with, and how much I could directly interact with my father.

When my sister and mother got sick with covid, my dad had to stay in a hotel for two weeks, forced to go to work from and return to the hotel due to fear of getting ill if he came back to his family. With my family sick and my father physically distant, I had to procure food daily from the outside world for everyone. I would bike each morning to the nearby Tim Hortons to buy everyone “breakfast”. At some point I realized that if I, a person who was in contact with known covid cases, was still interacting with strangers, that meant others were too. This realization furthered my fear of bringing home covid, my confusion about who could be interacted with safely, and how close I could physically be to my father.

I think a big cultural change that came about from covid was the normalization of meeting and conversing online. Before covid, jobs that offered the ability to work from home or on a hybrid schedule were rare, and a lot of my schoolwork was done in person. Post-pandemic, everyone wants to work on group projects online and synchronously, even if working in person would be more effective. For me and some of my peers, dependency on online communication went beyond that. The pandemic made me forget how to socialize properly. Texting became me and my friend’s default communication method. Texting allows someone to take their time with sending responses and deliberately choose the tone of their messages. When going back to socializing in person, I found the sudden change back to having to display appropriate facial expressions, replying right away, and engaging with other non-verbal aspects of communication to be more difficult than I remember. I recall that when I was upset to the point of tears, I had to text my friend sitting next to me to communicate what was troubling me because talking face to face had become so intimidating. With some of my other friends, we ended up avoiding each other because it had suddenly become awkward. We chose to engage with each other solely online, even when we went to the same school. Even today, I still tend to want to have hard conversations digitally, where I can be more deliberate with what I say and how I am perceived. Reversing this damage to my social skills has been a deliberate, constant effort that only started to pay off with a fresh start at the beginning of my first year of university.

Due to fear of spreading disease to my father, I spent a significant portion of my formative years behind a screen in order to make sure that he was safe. The damage to my social skills took a long time and a lot of effort to reverse it.