99 Post-Pandemic and the Things I Take for Granted

I was sixteen when COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. I was at home in Toronto, Ontario. I had just come back from a volleyball tournament in the United States. I was in my second year of high school, grade 10. Honestly, at first, I didn’t think to care. I started to pay attention when the lockdown was declared.

Just like for many students, our lockdown started as an extended March Break. I remember being quite excited about the prospect of 2 weeks off. When we didn’t go back to school, that’s when it felt like life changed. It was a lot of time in my room and a lot of time on screens. I feel lucky that I was at home with my family; I know my situation could have been a lot worse. It was hard. You felt stuck. You felt scared. I tried to fill my time with hobbies, music, movies, whatever I could. I took my daily walk outside. 

I think part of why it’s so hard to remember the details of my COVID experience is because there weren’t very many. Life was monotonous. 

My greatest challenge during the pandemic was feeling connected. Your community was the people in your “bubble,” and the people you could talk to through the computer. You’d be chatting with friends over FaceTime, then look away from your screen and remember that you were alone. The scariest part of the pandemic was the unknown. I remember often wondering if the rest of my life would be like this. Interestingly, my self-confidence improved over COVID. I think it stemmed from waiting for opportunity. I knew that once this was over, I would have my chance, and I would be able to do all the things I had been waiting so long to do. 

Education during the pandemic was a challenge for both teachers and students. It was an unprecedented situation. Luckily, I think COVID came at a time in my education where I had already developed good study habits and learned important skills. I know that might not be the case for younger students. I had a good foundation, and I think that supported me well, especially after the pandemic with my transition to university. I’ll admit, I didn’t pay much attention to school during the periods when we were completely online. During lockdowns, there were spans of time where our grades couldn’t go down. There were no consequences. Granted, it was a very difficult time, but I think it showed me that you could get by only doing the bare minimum. That was the first time I considered that just getting something done was “good enough.” While that outlook isn’t always bad, I think it fueled some negative study habits in the long-term. In a way, school was a good distraction. It gave you something to do, it gave you goals to meet. Completing assignments and projects were really the only accomplishments I could make during our time in lockdown. Sometimes you would be immersed in your studying, and it would feel like a regular night studying at the kitchen table.  

During that time, I felt like social milestones were put on hold. The ages I went through during COVID were the “teenage years” that the media loves to portray as some of the greatest times of your life. It was sometimes difficult to blow out the candles on those birthdays, feeling like I was just letting these ages pass me by. Even though the entire world was also on hold, I really felt like I was missing out. Socially, I felt like I was playing catch-up for a long time, and 5 years later, I still sometimes do.

Depression, loneliness, and a negative outlook on life are very common in the discourse of my generation. We seem to have a fatalistic perspective, and I think our experience through COVID contributed to this. Personally, anxiety is something that came out of the pandemic. I remember when the second lockdown was announced, I had what I can remember to be the first panic attack of my life. I know I have always been an anxious person, and that has certainly shown itself in my years at university, but I think that COVID was where a lot of those emotions were fostered. 

Cultural changes happened because of COVID-19, and social interaction is a huge one, particularly for my age group. I’ve found we struggle to hold eye contact, to greet people we know, or to just smile at someone passing by on the street. Our relationship with our electronics has changed and has contributed to these things. Our generation has a new platform for socialization. There are norms and conventions for how we conduct ourselves online, just like there are for real life. It was a necessary platform during the pandemic and still is, yet its presence has taken away from our skills for in-person socializing.

Collectively, I don’t think we’d ever been more nervous when we heard a deep cough in public or when someone stood too close to you. Mentally, you’d think of that person as a risk, sometimes even a danger. I think that’s because getting COVID seemed like you were irresponsible and unclean (which is not at all the truth). If you did get sick, you always had to find a scapegoat. You needed to find a party to blame, a person that you caught it from because it wasn’t your fault that you had it. You had to play the victim of the disease because you knew everyone would see you as the perpetrator. It is a lasting example of the stigma around illness. I think this experience for me speaks to how difficult life must’ve been during other historical epidemics.

I don’t think about my experience during COVID as much as I should. During lockdowns, I longed to do what I do daily now. I take it for granted. I should think of my sixteen-year-old self, who was so unsure, and go forward with gratitude for the things I am able to do today.