84 My COVID-19 Catalogue

When Covid started gaining Canadian attention in March of 2020, I was in grade 9 and freshly fifteen, as my birthday had been the month prior, in February. I had just started high school and, was still getting my feet underneath me in this new social environment when everything was pulled out from under me, and Ontario was sent into complete lockdown. To be honest, I couldn’t tell you for how long, from the top of my head. So much of quarantine, and the first lockdown especially, has just flattened into a non-linear period of timeless blur and isolation. I was attending Etobicoke School of the Arts, a TDSB high school, which upon checking, shut down on March 14th. We were fully online for the rest of grade 9, and I hated it. Virtual school was difficult and boring, and unless I was genuinely interested in the class material, it went in one ear and out the other. I retained nearly nothing outside of my science and English classes because I just didn’t care enough, and I wasn’t in an environment where I was forced to pay attention. Turning on cameras over virtual lectures was never mandatory, so I could just go on my phone, play Minecraft, or walk away entirely without consequence. Our grades were frozen, so I didn’t even have to worry about failing. I just stopped caring, because it felt like I didn’t have anything to care about. I’m lucky enough that this didn’t affect my grades in the long term, and that I was able to pull myself out of those habits once we went into a hybrid schedule for the beginning of the next school year. I saw how it affected my peers, though, who would struggle to stay on top of schoolwork once we were back in person. I would describe the hybrid schedule to you, but I can’t remember that either. I think that students were split into cohorts that would come in on different days to reduce contact, but the details are lost to me. I had little to no idea of what high school was supposed to be like because my time in person had been so short.

Being that isolated definitely affected my mental health and wellbeing. I had never been great at making friends, a task that now seemed impossible since I had to attend classes from the bubble of my own bedroom miles away. Before high school, I had gone to private schools my whole life and had never been in a classroom with more than 10 kids my age. This meant that my social skills were already limited to begin with. I drifted from several friends I had made in the first few months of grade 9 because we couldn’t see each other, and eventually just fell out of touch. I ended up stuck in a position where I only regularly talked to two people, and I really do think it affected my social skills in ways that I am still trying to undo. I became reclusive, antisocial, and afraid of talking to people my age because I didn’t know how. Even when we eventually returned to a fully in-person schedule, which was in grade 11, I struggled to make friends and ended up sitting at the back of classrooms, praying that the teacher wouldn’t assign group work because I was always the only one left without a group.

To fill the gaps in my social life, I turned to social media. I spent hours online, posting videos of myself to get the positive attention I lacked and so desperately wanted from people my age. While I did manage to make some friends online, a few of which I’m still in contact with, spending that much time on my phone was detrimental to my self-image. Everywhere I looked there were people prettier than me, happier than me, and the like. I had already been struggling on and off with my mental health for a few years at that point, and everything took a sharp turn for the worse. I felt terrible about myself. I didn’t understand how the teenagers and young adults on my phone made quarantine look so enjoyable. For them, it was a fun break from school. For me, it was lonely, and as someone who lived in a populated area, restrictions were heavy, and I rarely left the house. It seemed never-ending, and I felt so left behind, like I was missing out on the teenhood I was promised. We were still in lockdown during my sixteenth birthday. I know that for sure because it crushed my dreams of having the big sweet-sixteenth I had always wanted. I spent my birthday alone, in my room, facetiming my only two school friends because they couldn’t even come over. I became obsessed with the idea of making my life as perfect as it could be, so that when quarantine ended, I would be ready for the teen experiences that Disney Channel movies told me I could have. Haircuts, changing my eyebrows, new clothes, I tried all of it. None of it made me feel any better. So much of my life was out of my control that I ended up grasping for whatever I still could control. Unfortunately, that ended up being my weight. I developed an eating disorder during Covid that I am still recovering from today, and I know that I’m not the only one who did. Supplementing socializing with scrolling on social media makes you forget that not everyone looks like an Instagram model. It gets hard to feel good about existing in a perfectly normal body when all you see online are extraordinary ones, and that’s really damaging for young teenagers. If I had to name one good thing that came out of Covid and lockdown for me, it’s that I eventually realized that no amount of changing my body would make me confident if I didn’t like myself at all to begin with. I think it would have taken me a lot longer to accept myself and my appearance if I didn’t have the experience of trying so hard to change it.

The course theme I think best relates to my Covid-19 experience is shame and secrecy. I spent so much time hidden away in my room, struggling alone and feeling ashamed to reach out for help. I felt like I had to keep all of my problems secret because my loved ones were already bearing their own Covid burdens, and I didn’t want to add my own. During the lockdowns, I didn’t develop any new skills, or try any new things, and I was ashamed of that too. Along with the mental health struggles that made me feel ashamed of myself and the way that I looked, there was a level of shame that came with catching Covid, too. I remember the first time I got a positive test, I was more embarrassed than worried. It made me feel like I had done something stupid and not been careful enough, and that people would think I was irresponsible and endangering people when in reality, I think I just picked it up at school once we had started the hybrid schedule. My parents shut me in my room, and I didn’t even tell my peers I had gotten sick until after I had fully recovered to avoid the stigma that came with catching Covid. My whole life had essentially become a secret that not even my parents fully knew. In conclusion, I’ve worked hard to improve myself and my mental health since and have made a lot of progress. Though I wonder sometimes what my life would be like right now if lockdown had never happened. How much has been taken away from me?