126 When Life Stood Still: My Covid Story

This cancellation happened before COVID hit my world. I remember the lockdown so clearly. At first, the lockdown was almost exciting. As someone who loves playing video games, I suddenly had all the time in the world to enjoy them thoroughly. Staying up late with friends daily, joking over voice chat, and messing around online were some of my fondest memories during those early weeks of the lockdown. We all believed that COVID was a short-term disruption to our lives and something that would pass in a couple of months at most. The lockdown, however, kept getting extended, reaching well over a year in length, while also getting harsher conditions, moving more and more towards a complete shutdown of virtually all activities. As this continued, the novelty wore off tremendously, and the weight of that realization slowly settled into our lives.

The pandemic and subsequent lockdown brought about many scarring changes to all of our lives. Still, for me, the shift in schooling and interactions impacted me the most. The rise in virtual learning shifted the way I experience education. After living in this post-COVID age, I honestly can’t say it’s been for the better. I did not have the pleasure of experiencing university before the lockdown, so I can’t fully evaluate if my experiences resulted from the lockdown or if a return to normalcy actually occurred. I say this because I don’t know if universities always had online components, but the pandemic made them much more prevalent in how we interact with our education. What this growth in online educational delivery brought, I felt, was a drastic shift in engagement. More and more students, myself included for some time, felt content with never stepping foot on campus, instead opting to attend lectures virtually or watch the recordings later, interacting with peers as little as possible. I envisioned university as a place where people from all backgrounds shared ideas, built connections, and thrived in a community of similar individuals. While those moments are still present in some aspects of my university experience, I instead found a much more isolated experience than anticipated. Even with in-person classes being in full swing, that sense of connectedness and fullness of the school weakened from my perspective, and I couldn’t help but wonder if COVID-19 permanently changed the culture of student life on campus.

Beyond my personal anecdotes, the pandemic and lockdown left a lasting impact worldwide. The way people interacted with one another shifted as we saw the full embracement of the digital age. New positive practices such as care for personal hygiene were also felt in full swing, but for me, the most profound change was the mental health toll it took on everyone, especially my generation (early 20s). The isolation that resulted from the lockdown and the overall uncertainty of our future outlook took its toll on many of us. One of the primary things affected was motivation. I felt motivation became much more challenging to sustain as a general sense of disconnect was established. Increased stress and anxiety, coupled with the need to re-evaluate your aspirations and disruptions of the norm, don’t paint a pretty picture of staying motivated and engaged with what you’re trying to return to.  

We live in an age of information; so much stuff is out there that it’s hard not only to consume everything necessary but also to pinpoint what you should know about any given topic. As such, if scholars were to study the COVID-19 pandemic 100 years from now, I would first and foremost want them to understand our collective lived experience. People lost so much from this experience, from loved ones to missing many key events in life to the myriad changes in how we now view and interact with the world, that it would be ignorant to pretend otherwise. If this life-altering experience of mine and many others were reduced to statistics and simply recognized as a public health crisis, it would not truly reflect what transpired. 

After learning more about different plagues throughout history and how their effects are deeply intertwined with people and our behaviours, one key thing that stood out when reflecting on my COVID experience was the rampant stigmatization throughout. In COVID’s onset, plenty of blame was thrown around without evidence, which led to plenty of vitriol being thrown people’s way. I clearly remember many people posting the continued discrimination directed at the Asian community in America and how cruelly they were treated. I also recall the drastic political divide that emerged from the pandemic, as simply wearing masks was the topic of heated conversations. As the virus continued to spread, these sentiments only heightened. This general societal response to the pandemic highlighted unfortunate shortcomings, focusing on scapegoating and misinformation rather than solidarity and compassion.