1 2020: A CovOdyssey
Nathan St. George
When the Covid pandemic began in March of 2020, I had turned 16 years old two months prior. I was a little over halfway through grade ten, second year of high school. I lived in an apartment in Hamilton, Ontario, and attended Westdale Secondary School. I remember the day Covid really became “real” for me. It was the last day of class before March Break, and it was grey and cloudy. I can’t remember if it rained or not, but regardless, it was almost like a dark portent of what was coming. It was announced either that day or the day before that schools would be closed for an extra two weeks after the break. Well, it didn’t come back when it was supposed to. Lockdowns soon began and we were only meant to go out when we needed to. I sat inside all day for a long time. Social distancing became common practice, as well as masking; most places required masks. Going out to places like restaurants, movie theatres, amusement parks etc. became less common and sometimes even disallowed. It really felt like life stood still.
For a long time before Covid I was an indoors person, and I spent a lot of time either playing video games or watching YouTube. This continued during Covid. I can’t really remember what I thought about it early on, but I don’t think I was too upset. Eventually, that changed. When school restarted for grade eleven and it was all online, I was upset about that. I like school, and fully virtual school for a whole grade was awful. It was harder to pay attention and retain information and also made friendships more difficult to maintain. I think that year was definitely my least favourite school year ever, and it honestly feels like a blank record in my memory. I genuinely can’t recall many details of that year, even ones not related to school. Grade twelve was mostly back to in person, though around January it briefly went online for a week or two again. But other than that one blip, it was a relatively normal year. Although, most classes at my school stopped having end of term exams, which I think was an odd choice and poor for post-secondary preparation. I do consider myself lucky though, in that I didn’t start or end high school during the pandemic. I feel it would’ve been far harder to adjust to grade nine if it was all virtual, and much harder to prepare for post-high school life in grade twelve if it was online. Long term, I think people my own age and I are going to be relatively fine. I worry about younger generations whose first year(s) of school were impacted by the pandemic, as well as students who still do online schooling. From my own experience learning is far harder through a screen, so I imagine growing up with it would be even worse.
It wasn’t all bad though! Covid really got me back into reading. I hadn’t read a lot since probably around grade five. Near the start of the pandemic, I got some books to have something to do other than stare at screens all day every day. Mostly history books. I’m a history student! Beyond just getting me into reading again, I think books heightened my actual love for history. My favourite from lockdown was 1492 by Charles C. Mann, about the Pre-Columbian Americas. I found it fascinating, and it really sparked an interest in Indigenous history. Beyond reading, Covid also got me thinking about my own health and helped me improve it. I weighed more than I wanted to and I ate unhealthily, and generally did not have the best self-esteem because of it. During Covid, I guess being stuck inside helped me realize I really didn’t like the life I was living and pushed me to make the changes I needed to. I began eating better and I also began walking a lot. I really developed a love for nature and the outdoors I never had before, a love I still have now. Despite the challenges of life during the pandemic, I am grateful for it in a strange way, since it helped me become the person I am now, someone I want to be and someone I’m proud of being.
One thing I believe has come out of Covid is stigma surrounding being sick, not just with Covid, but in general. People view others who are sick as a “threat”, for lack of a better term. They worry about getting sick themselves, which is completely understandable after the pandemic. There’s always been stigma associated with pandemics and disease, so it’s no surprise that there’s stigma with Covid. But that doesn’t make it any better or easier to deal with the fact that it feels more all-encompassing than it used to be. Personally, when I’ve been sick during and since the pandemic, I’ve worried about showing it in public, even when I know it’s not Covid. In fall 2022, during my first semester at university, I got this really bad cough that lasted like a month. It wasn’t Covid, so I still went to school for most of it; I couldn’t really afford to miss a whole month of school, especially while I was still adjusting to post-secondary. Despite the fact that it wasn’t Covid, I was always so worried in class about going into a coughing fit. I didn’t want to be judged or looked at strangely for being sick, but that’s what it felt like would happen every time I coughed. There was one class I remember actually going into a coughing fit in, and I felt so embarrassed and like I was standing out. It felt like everyone was watching me because of it.
In the future, when scholars are studying the pandemic, I hope they understand how much it affected everyone, because it really did. I didn’t lose anyone to the pandemic, and none of my immediate family ever even got Covid, but it was still probably the worst time of my life. Even though the pandemic really did help me as a person, it still took so much away from me. I’m also just one person writing a very brief description of my experiences during the Covid pandemic. Every single person who lived through the pandemic has their own story to tell as well. Multiply my story by eight billion; that’s how many individual stories there are. I hope scholars remember everyone was affected and had their own experiences. The pandemic wasn’t just something that damaged the economy or killed a certain number of people. It affected everyone individually and everyone has their own stories, and to me that’s what matters most.
