88 My Personal Covid Experience: More Than Just a Joke
Anonymous
During Covid, I was a high-school student living in Richmond Hill, Ontario. I was 15 years old when the pandemic first started. I still remember leaving school and hearing that our March break was getting extended by two extra weeks. I was so excited. Throughout the duration of the pandemic, I lived in a rented townhouse and spent most of my time in my bedroom alone. The house was semi-detached and had three floors. I lived on the bottom floor alone. It was like a studio apartment – I was completely secluded. For further context, I was in tenth grade at the time at Richmond Hill High School.
Like most other people in Ontario, my family went into lockdown almost immediately. Soon after our March break started, the government called a state of emergency, and the entire country went into full lockdown. This lockdown lasted for a few months. Initially, they focused on shutting down non-essential businesses and schools but later, I remember them enforcing a stay-at-home order. A result of schools shutting down was that I could no longer see my friends in person.
On a day-to-day basis, I was always using hand sanitizer. But honestly, the biggest change for me was probably not being at school every day. At first, I loved it – less work and more time to relax. But that got old. I started to miss walking around the halls in school with my friends. I missed hanging out with them and playing basketball after school at the park. I didn’t love all my classes, but in hindsight, I liked them more than Google Meets.
The hardest part of Covid for me was the social aspect. Since I couldn’t be with my friends in person, I spent more time online than I ever have before. Every day, I was chatting with my friends and playing games on a communication platform called Discord. Daily, without fail, I was on Discord. It was where I laughed, vented, and tried to feel normal with my best friends. But it was also where I was the most vulnerable. This led to problems of its own because I didn’t always feel emotionally safe with the people I talked to every day. For me, that online space of Discord was both an escape and a prison.
At first, [virtual schooling] wasn’t terrible. I learned better how to navigate Google Classroom and Google Meets. But at some point, my district school board announced that our final grades for the year wouldn’t be able to go lower than they were once the pandemic started. The implication for me was that I didn’t have to try in school anymore. No matter what I did that semester, my grades wouldn’t go lower than what they previously were.
In the long run, this was terrible for my learning. This is when I started to grow habits of “just getting by” and cheating at times on assignments or tests because it was so easy to. At that time, everyone was doing it so even though I felt bad for cheating, I’d think, “But everyone else is doing it.” I no longer cared about paying attention to classes and listening to my teacher. I can recall many times that I’d join my class, mute the tab, and then play video games.
For both me and my peers, we grew deep-rooted habits of laziness and poor work ethic. We grew up in an environment that enabled us to do so. Regarding the laziness, I think it’s impacted the kind of student I am even today. I’ve worked hard to fix that part of myself, but it’s still hard. I think virtual schooling was terrible for students who went through it, and the impact still lingers today.
Stigma is something we’ve talked a lot about in this course and it’s the course theme I’ll be relating to my personal Covid experience. People who lived with plague, cholera, HIV/AIDS, and even the flu were treated as less-than, either because of fear or because they needed someone to blame. For example, Ryan White contracted HIV and once his diagnosis was public, more than half of the school wanted to ban him from attending school. Rather than a huge public humiliation, stigmatization in my experience was more private and personal. It came from the people who I thought were my closest friends.
Early into the pandemic, I caught Covid, and I was the first in my friend group to contract it. I don’t know how exactly I got it, but I did. I remember telling my friends over Discord that I got Covid when we were gaming, and at first, they seemed chill about it. But after some time had passed, their sensitivity towards me grew cold and distant. The way they talked to me started to slowly change. But after I got Covid, every time I made a mistake in the game, they’d make comments like “It must have infected your brain too.” At first, I thought it was just the normal banter, but the jokes got a lot darker.
In gaming, making a callout is when you let your teammates know where the enemy is or give them some other useful information. When I’d give a bad callout, they’d say, “Kill yourself,” or “You know we’re only friends with you because we grew up with you, right?” Once, one of them even told me: “The nurse that delivered you should go to hell for their sins,” and then he laughed. They all laughed like it was nothing. But eventually, I stopped laughing. They said it was ‘just joking’ but it made me feel worthless. I stayed friends with them because it felt like they were all I had, even as they reminded me how little they thought of me. I was the “idiot who was stupid enough to catch Covid.”
This was an experience that helped me better understand how stigma is often correlated to separation and feeling ostracized. In this class, we learned that stigmatization often involves labelling and isolating people for being different – for being sick. This happened to me too. It wasn’t in public; it was in the private space of a Discord call. My closest friends treated me as “less” and it primarily stemmed from the fact that I contracted Covid. My sickness or susceptibility to it made me lesser in their eyes.
I previously mentioned the example of Ryan White who contracted HIV. He was bullied and banned from his school because of something out of his control. Similarly, I contracted Covid, and it wasn’t because I wanted to – it was out of my control. Neither of us chose to be sick, but we were both isolated and turned into symbols of rejection. Our value as people was overlooked because of the stigma associated with the illness we both carried. Stigmas dehumanize us and enable others to use illness as an excuse to be so cruel. What I’d want scholars to remember is that the Covid pandemic exposed more than just pathogens.
