60 The Impact of COVID-19 on my Mental Health
Sophia
Being back to normal, it feels as though COVID-19 never happened. It was a blip in time, a pause on life, it does not even feel like the same lifetime. Going about my everyday life in 2025, I feel as though the quarantine that was around 2 years ago was just a random event. It feels weird to reflect and think that was our life for a little bit and then suddenly, we are back to normal as if it never happened. Now, of course, nothing ever fully went back to normal, but it is different from the years spent in full lockdown, scared out of our minds.
It all started with a two-week break from school. I was 15 years old and in 10th grade studying for my OSSLT. Which, if you did not know, is the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test. One of the most stressful exams you can take in secondary school. The two weeks off felt like a saving grace since it meant our OSSLT was pushed back, but we didn’t expect it to last as long as it did. When the lockdown started, I was at my house with my mother, father, brother, and dog. Thankfully, we live in rural Niagara, so while we were isolated from the real world, we could at least enjoy the outside world distanced from other people. During this time, I was just entering my real teenager era of my life, meaning I was starting to think about who I truly am and find an identity in myself and what I love.
At the beginning of the two weeks, we were forced into full lockdown. This meant staying in the house and only leaving for necessities. Around this time, I remember how cautious everyone was with making sure not to go near any other individuals. The full lockdown that I experienced was from March until July of 2020. Once the weather got nice and we started understanding the virus more, it felt safe to at least hang out with people outside in the warm weather. My day-to-day changed quite drastically as I had a lot more time to focus on myself since I was not hanging out with friends. During this time, I started focusing more on school and my physical health. For me, that meant dedicating all my time to schoolwork or being outside. My days changed; I no longer had school, so I stayed up late and woke up late. I also got to spend a lot more time outside and with my family. However, these things got boring after a while of not being able to socialize.
The free time on my hands and the social isolation that came with the lockdown led to some major changes to my mental health. During quarantine and after, I honestly thought that the lockdown was good for my mental health because it was letting me reflect on all these things in my life. However, now that we have been out of lockdown for a while, it’s clear that the time I spent cooped up in my room did more damage than good.
My obsession with doing well in school came from the amount of time I had because I was not hanging out with friends. I became obsessed with grades to the point where I was doing homework from the time I woke up, until 10 pm every day. My entire second half of high school, the time I was experiencing COVID-19 and in lockdown, this fear of failing or being below my standards was taking a larger toll on me than I thought. I would spend as little time outside, with my family, or just destressing in general, which was not healthy for me. It was not until my first year of university that I realized I had no clue how to balance my work and social life, and this led to even more anxiety about failing. It took a while to teach myself this balance and understand that there is more to life than just work.
The social isolation that came with COVID-19 also led to me developing immense social anxiety. It was not just the social isolation, but also the choice of focusing on homework over social get-togethers. The immense time I spent doing homework also meant that when things started opening again, I favoured doing homework instead of going out. There were many weekends when there were parties or times when my friends wanted to hang out, and I skipped out because I wanted to focus on my homework. This lack of social interactions outside of my friends on FaceTime led me to develop a lot of social anxiety. I considered myself a very introverted and independent person, but that was purely because I was forced to be by the social isolation of lockdown. The first time I went out again and met new people was in July 2021. I was so terrified of interacting with these new people and making a good impression that I had a panic attack. I was never a socially anxious person before COVID-19, and now that I’m able to be out, I would consider myself the farthest from socially anxious.
Understanding COVID through this course, one of the main themes that I experienced and saw come out of COVID, was fear and the unknown which also contributed to my mental health in COVID-19. Similar to characteristics of a plague, there was so much fear surrounding plagues and pandemics, because without germ theory little was known. Who is susceptible, where did it come from, how does it spread, and what is the virus or disease? These are all questions that remained unanswered for so long that led to this immense fear of disease. Even then, with our advanced knowledge about disease, viruses, and their spread, there was still so much fear around COVID-19. During this time when we believed we were beyond pandemics, it became even scarier to see such a large pandemic spring out of nowhere. Since my fear of COVID-19 was so prominent, it also led me to isolate myself from the outside world longer than needed. With little known about it, I was terrified of the consequences and this long-term isolation just advanced my already bad relationship with school and social interactions.
In conclusion, the experience that was the COVID-19 lockdown was intense and something I would have thought of living through. To see how much I have changed because of COVID, and how, because it was during my developmental years how much it feels like the changes in my life were because of my COVID experience. It is hard to distinguish what is my personal development and what was caused by COVID because it was so intertwined. Although it was difficult to live so much of the important part of my life locked inside my house and over Zoom with my friends, I do not think the person I am today, whom I love, would have been the same without it.
