11 Bittersweet Changes

I remember first hearing about the news of a new virus originating from China spreading around the world, entering and afflicting new nations one by one. I was only 14 years old and in grade 9 when I had first heard the news, which had seemed completely unreal at the time. For a disease that could spread so rapidly, it did send a shiver down my spine back then thinking about how my family and I were living in Abu Dhabi, which was an hour from Dubai, a tourist hot spot of all places. Even so, such big pandemics were only heard of in history books and boring textbooks, and my belief in the fact that nothing that interesting could possibly happen while I’m alive witnessing it served as a source of comfort. What I failed to realize, however, was that this could possibly be the most defining moment for the course of the rest of my years to come.

Hearing the news of a lockdown was a shocker, to say the least. As a kid I couldn’t fully grasp how serious of a situation we were facing, especially when the only thing on my mind was how many hours I could spend on video games thanks to Covid. The government in the U.A.E holds a lot of power over its citizens, and so the mandates were quite strict. Everyone was encouraged to remain at home, but many locations and destinations were closed as of March, including entertainment areas, shopping centers, and religious buildings as well. Schools and most jobs had been shifted towards being held online, and most people weren’t going to risk leaving their homes to face both a new disease and police enforcements. Growing up I was naturally quiet and introverted, so the sound of staying home all day seemed like a gift from God himself. My virtual schooling days would consist of joining classes online and making excuses as to why I couldn’t get my camera working, while my friends would do the same as we would be in a voice chat separately, which would emulate the feeling of goofing around in the back of class.

The novelty of the situation only lasted so long, however, and the effects of the lockdown would slowly begin to dawn upon me. As I spent more time on my lonesome, I began to realize that my reasoning for turning off my camera and microphone in class had slowly shifted from being able to talk with my friends without the teacher noticing towards not being able to show my face and speak while an entire classroom watched on their screens. I had always been shy, but the thought of an entire classroom watching me through their laptops and focusing on me solely would leave me paralyzed. Looking back, it seems that being forced to sit in a classroom with my peers had at least forced me out of my comfort zone, but virtual schooling had made it all too easy to cast a shadow over myself. This fear of being heard and seen would only grow, until eventually I couldn’t even call my friends or show my face to them anymore, as the only thing that would go through my head was how I couldn’t for whatever reason. There was nothing that I wanted more than to have friends I could hang out with and share normal teenage experiences with, but both the lockdown and my self-esteem held me back.  This was a horrible effect that Covid and the lockdown had on me, and suddenly the virus wasn’t nearly as big of a problem as my self-loathing was.

This would go on for a while, and I would continuously sleep through my classes, not talk to anyone and spend time on my own, but the best part about hitting rock bottom is that you can only go up from there. Being forced to spend all this time alone had spurred a strange change within me, and I had become unusually self-reflective for a 15-year-old. With no one else to converse with besides my younger siblings and parents who “couldn’t understand” what I was going through (because adults were never kids in the past, of course), all I was left to share my feelings with was myself. It was the walks in my backyard at 4 AM, staring at the stars after a drawn-out gaming session, that helped me tackle the challenges I was facing in my life, along with what the essence of my life really was. This fear I had of who I had come from me and me alone, which is laughable considering the one person who we can really count on in our lives is only ourselves. I don’t think that I would have become that close with myself if it wasn’t for the lockdown, and I probably would have found less-beneficial ways to go about dealing with my problems, but if there’s one thing that came out of it, it was this.

School had opened back up halfway through grade 11, nearly 2 years after the lockdown had first been enforced, but I came back an entirely new person ready to take on the world and any other rampant diseases that would come my way. I feel as though my experience with Covid was a story of isolation, and although we have seen this with plagues in the past, I still find the effects of isolation on a person’s mind to be fascinating no matter the day and age, especially considering my own reaction to isolation. The way that diseases can separate humans from each other is throwing extra dirt on top of the wounds that the affliction of the disease itself causes to the body and serves as a way to affect both their mental and physical state. This is why although I and countless others hadn’t really caught a case of Covid, I still believe the impact it had on everyone is immeasurable to say the least.