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DISCLAIMER:In this blog, it may come across like I’m complaining about how the pandemic affected me , but I’m truly grateful and recognize that I’m privileged to be able to stay at home and do regular things. I recognize that I don’t have to worry about going to my job everyday, working on finances, or the potential negative effects that the virus can have on me. I pay my respects to all the essential workers that go out everyday and put their lives on line to help control this pandemic.We honestly can't do this without them. I’ve started this blog to talk about my personal experience with the pandemic and how it personally impacted me. Everything I say should be taken with a grain of salt as each of us have our own story to tell. I just wanted to share mine. Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy it!
2020 has tested the world in ways that people could not imagine and it has been a wild roller coaster. Every month there was something new and it just seemed to be getting a little bit more worse just when we thought it would get better . Of course, the straw to cap it off was the COVID-19 pandemic. People all across the world were asked to put their daily lives on a pause and sit at home. The lives we once knew of going outside constantly to buy groceries, eating food at your local restaurant, taking a trip to the other side of the world, interacting with humans from hours on end,creating precious memories, were gone, just like that. The experience for many of us was trans formative and something we never would have expected.
Personally for me, my in-person school environment with 5 classes a day was replaced with an online education filled with meaningless and exhausting assignments with little to no interaction with my peers. Don't get me wrong, I was grateful to still have an education even if it was online, but the transition was very hard to digest and even harder to cope with. Due to the pandemic, I lost my golden “second semester of senior year high school experience” filled with prom, graduation, senior trips, and one last time to live my life before a new chapter of my life: college. Of course, this loss is very slim in comparison to what I still have to experience in the rest of my life. However, these were the events that I had been looking forward to since I was a freshman in high-school 4 years ago. I always thought second semester senior year would be one of the best few months of my life and would have never expected it to end like this.
Everything was just so fast-paced and I barely had time to digest it and my daily routine changed so fast. To this day, I still try to recall “What was my life like before the pandemic?” and re-imagine the small things that made my life whole. Whether it be waking up at 4:30 every school morning to complete homework , biking back home from school under the glistening sun, spending my evenings going to my local middle school to teach entrepreneurship , everything just feels so distant. After 4 months in quarantine my routine consists of wake up, eat breakfast, work, eat lunch with my family, work, take a walk, eat dinner, read, sleep and repeat. I miss the adrenaline that I got from school; the adrenaline that spiked in my brain when my friends and I were reviewing last minute graphs before a math test, when I was in a tournament waiting on the results and the adrenaline of just being around people. Staying at home continuously is taking away my sense of emotion because there is nothing to be too sad or too happy about and I miss that. There is no opportunity for adrenaline and all the days blur together into one.
I was well aware that my losses to this pandemic were very first-world compared to people who were actually battling the virus and I have the most respect for those who have actually suffered. However, I learned that it’s okay to feel sad over my loss as long as I checked my privilege and still had gratitude for my other opportunities. COVID-19 taught me to be appreciative and strike a balance between my work life and relaxing with my family. As an unexpected event, the pandemic has brought both the good and the not so good but most importantly a story to tell.