40 The Disease That Debilitated My Livelihood

The title that I decided upon was “The Disease That Debilitated My Livelihood.” I don’t mean to exclude the experiences of other people with this title but am instead framing the title through my own experiences with COVID-19. The pandemic actively cut me off from multiple facets of my life, such as my extracurriculars, my studies, my friendships, my faith, and my ability to interact with the people around me, effectively debilitating my livelihood. The person I would have been in a world without COVID-19 is a completely different person from who I am today.

Physically, I was in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, trapped within the confines of my own home. I was 14 years old, turning 15, and I was in the second semester of my grade 9 year. I was excited but nervous about my first year of high school and was even trying out for clubs, like the volleyball club, but I had gotten sick the week before March break with pneumonia, forcing me to miss an extra week of school before the break. I thought it was the end of the world, but I was wrong.

My family went into full lockdown almost immediately, because of the pneumonia that I had gotten the week prior, we were already on high alert about illnesses and had even gotten protective masks much earlier than the people around us. Our lockdown went from March 2020 to mid-2021, with very few occasions where we were allowed to go outside to interact with others, namely school. There were a number of day-to-day changes that I believe were absurd but made sense at the time. First, the school was originally changed to an “octomester”, with eight separate 21-day classes that were forced to teach us an entire subject in such a short period of time. The classes themselves lasted the entire day, leading to classes of students trapped in a single room for close to 8 hours, being forced to survive a nonstop onslaught of supposed learning. The “octomester” design was very quickly scrapped as the teachers quickly realized how ineffective it was, with students instead suffering through the slightly less painful mixture of online learning and “quadromesters”. The rest of my daily living became a day-to-day rot behind my screen as I had to learn the latest updates about the virus on screens, had to endure online learning behind screens, and even my entertainment and escapism occurred behind screens. Another challenge that continuously presented itself was the transfer of in-person activities to online. Activities like karate, swimming, and other extracurriculars were without warning transferred to some form of online iteration, causing me to lose interest. The world around me was becoming more and more digitized and I was unimpressed by the absurdity of the situation.

There were so many life events that I feel I was robbed of. First, my high school experience felt like a shadow of a caricature of what it should have been. I understand that the media exaggerates the high school experience, but simple things like clubs were completely stolen from me. Originally, I had planned to join the volleyball club, wrestling club, and football club during my time in high school, but I never had the opportunity to join any of these clubs because of the pandemic. I also didn’t understand the culture of high school, the concepts of freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors were entirely unknown to me until I was a senior myself. The act of studying for tests was also foreign to me. I spent the majority of online learning watching shows and scrolling through social media instead of paying attention to class, the teachers were unable to fail us, so I didn’t see a point in caring about the material. Even now, I struggle with studying for tests, midterms, and exams because I never experienced a need to do so during my high school career. I feel as if it was a vital point in my life to pull an all-nighter, or to revise notes in the hallway outside of class but there was never a situation that garnered such a response, leading me to do the bare minimum and achieve the bare minimum. During my time in university, a major struggle has been learning to study effectively, and I realize that if my high school experience had just been “normal,” I wouldn’t be struggling the way that I am.

A course theme that I believe I experienced during the pandemic was fear. Throughout the course we have seen that, time and again, one of the most dangerous aspects of a disease is the fear it causes. Despite almost never occurring in North America, the Ebola scare caused mass panic among many people, including myself. The fear of cholera in Soho was so extreme that despite being geographically limited, nearly everyone was worried for their wellbeing. The black gay population never took proper precautions against AIDS until they realized that they were at risk, only when the fear of AIDS settled in did they take action to protect themselves. The same effects of fear took place with COVID-19. My family acted quicker because the fear of disease, caused by my earlier pneumonia, had already entered my home. The people around us were rushing to buy excessive amounts of toilet paper and hand sanitizer because they were afraid of being vulnerable without those items. The reason my school and extracurriculars were all transferred online was because of the overarching fear of close contact causing COVID-19. Every action, reaction, and interaction that happened between March 2020 to mid-2022 was all in some way, shape, or form, a result of the fear that had permeated our society.