13 Boy, Was I Wrong!
Shay Moolayil
March 11th, 2020. Four days before my 18th birthday, and two days before the start of March Break. I was sitting in my data management class when my teacher read an announcement from the principal, “Due to the ongoing global situation with coronavirus, March Break will be extended by a week to allow for proper quarantine of those traveling.” Needless to say, I was ecstatic! I thought I got the best birthday gift a kid could ask for: an extra week to stay at my parent’s home in Mississauga and goof off. Boy, was I wrong!
I’m probably older than most other people in this class — I was in Grade 12 and was on track to graduate in June 2020. But what started as just one week off then became a couple of months till the end of the semester. Most people think of their senior year as a celebratory occasion, but for me, it was completed at home. My classes were held over Zoom calls, and I didn’t have final exams but instead eight final-year assignments in place of them. Our high school marks were frozen, so some people didn’t even put effort into this remaining work. During this period, my day-to-day life consisted of waking up sometime before noon, going for a few hours of online classes, and then doing whatever I wanted to do. Unfortunately, I lost many friends during this time since we didn’t have the social setting of school, and I didn’t have Instagram or other social media platforms to stay in contact with most people. However, this inadvertently allowed me to become infinitely closer to a few friends, and they became my crutches during the pandemic. Interesting anecdote: I was able to graduate despite not completing the 40 hours of volunteer work required to get an OSSD because the government waived the requirement.
It was near the end of the semester when I got my acceptance into the McMaster Life Sciences program. I remember thinking to myself, “Things will open up in September.” Boy, was I wrong! Cut to my entire first year of university being online — chemistry labs were virtual simulations, psych tutorials were meetings on MS Teams, and final exams were glorified, online Avenue quizzes. It was a full lockdown on the academic portion of my life, and my personal life wasn’t any better. My family and I stayed indoors for the entire duration of 2020 and part of 2021, only occasionally venturing out to pick up groceries that we ordered online or for other important business. This was my life for the better part of a year till we got the vaccines in 2021.
There were many academic and personal milestones I missed out on because of COVID 19. My high school graduation was something I had always looked up to, but instead, it was an unceremonious Zoom presentation that I couldn’t even attend because I had a chemistry test on the same day. Also, prom was cancelled, and I never received my high school yearbook. Jumping forward to September, my welcome week to McMaster was a series of meetings and breakout rooms. The biggest challenge throughout all these pandemic experiences was the feeling of isolation. I had already lost contact with most of my friends from high school, and it was a struggle to meet new people in the online university environment. I’m sure it had an immense emotional and mental toll on everyone our age, but we made the best of what we had and tried to find the positives in the bleak situation. For example, I was able to grow extremely close with the few friends who did stay in contact with me, and they are some of my best friends even to this day. Additionally, I utilized the time to focus on my career goals and other hobbies (such as drawing, cooking, and baking) and hone my skills/experiences to help me pursue these dreams.
Many distinct cultural shifts occurred due to the pandemic. Most notably, people started to place blame on others because of the fear they felt. As we’ve discussed repeatedly throughout this course, this is a common tactic people use to make sense of the confusion that’s associated with plagues. It’s a lot easier to understand why the world is rapidly changing when you can point the finger at another person and pin all the blame on them. During the AIDS crisis, it was homosexuals and Haitians who took the fall. Before that, the Black Death was blamed on Jewish communities. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the target was Asian people — there were misguided beliefs that coronavirus was a biological weapon from China or that the cultural diet of Asians led to the pandemic. I remember reading about how the discrimination against Asian American people spiked in 2020 and seeing conspiracy theories online about COVID-19. As a result, many Asian communities suffered from hate crimes during the pandemic. Unfortunately, it’s part of human nature to lash out when we are in unknown situations, and we’ve seen this repeatedly in the history of plagues. The pandemic in 2020 was no different. It fostered the perfect breeding environment for anti-Asian sentiment and sparked a major cultural shift that’s still felt today.
Reflecting on my overall experience during the pandemic, what I initially thought was a vacation from school rapidly turned into a huge roadblock in my life. I missed several important personal and academic milestones, lost out on many friendships, and witnessed a cultural shift in the attitudes towards Asians. While some positives did come out of the experience (mainly getting closer with my few friends and more free time to explore my hobbies/career goals), it is bittersweet considering all that I missed out on and the sociopolitical ramifications that still impact us.
