Note: this post talks about covid-19 and quarantine. There is a description of blood and a brief mention of suicidality.
My “covid-versary” is March 13th. Friday, March 13th, 2020, was the day the pandemic changed my day-to-day life. That’s when I left school and moved back home with my family, where I stayed for 10 months straight, before coming back to campus this January for my senior spring.
I remember the day I left really well. It was a bad day in the middle of a bad week, and I was having other major problems that weren’t related to covid. I had had my period for five weeks straight. I was dizzy from a lack of blood. I went to the gynecologist (my last trip out and last doctor appointment for a long time) at the start of that week. She gave me a birth control pill to take to stop my period. It made me suicidal. I stopped taking it.
Then on Friday I moved out. I had to pack everything up very quickly. (note: blood) I got a bloody nose, and it dripped blood on my shirt (one of my favorite shirts!), and I remember feeling like there was blood coming out from all over me, because I was also still having the other bleeding. It was also Friday the 13th, which is supposed to be unlucky, although I’m trying to not be superstitious anymore because it’s not a healthy way for me to think.
I was lucky that I got to say good goodbyes to all my friends. I was taking the coronavirus much more seriously than my friends seemed to think it would be. So I really did say goodbye to my friends thinking I may never see them again. I spent the whole day with them while I was packing up (they weren’t leaving…yet), and I got to give them all long hugs. I’m really glad that I did. Now that I’m back on campus this semester, and some other people are, too, I’ve gotten to see some friends in person, but there are some people that I still haven’t seen in person since that day, and I truly don’t know if I’ll ever see them in person again, since we’re graduating now and going in different directions.
It’s funny to me (and very unfortunate) that a lot of my predictions actually came true. I think it’s because trauma has taught me that bad things can happen and they can be really bad, and my friends, I guess, didn’t really know that. When we got the announcement that classes were cancelled, my friends cheered for no school. I was horrified. I knew that if things were bad enough to cancel classes, they must be really bad. My friend tried to calm me down by saying that the death rate was “only 5%.” That is a huge percentage, and so many people have died this year, because 5% of a large population is a lot of people. My friends might have thought I was making too big a deal out of saying goodbyes, and that I was being overly cautious by going home… but those ended up being good things to do. I wish the worst hadn’t happened, but it did.
I remember wondering to my friends if we would forget what “normal” life was like, and them having an attitude of, “no, of course we’ll remember it, this won’t last long.” And then just today I saw an article in the Atlantic about all the people that are forgetting what pre-pandemic life was like.
Some things seem to have permanently changed in my life. One is zoom, and also google meet and FaceTime. It’s really useful for staying connected to people in other places, and for…everything. I think classes will (or at least, should) continue to offer online attendance as an option even when it’s safe to go back to classrooms. It does make it easier for me to attend, but there’s also a lot that I miss out on by not being in the classroom, like having side conversations with friends.
Another change is that I now go on a walk basically every day. And I have been doing this now for almost a year. This is strange to me; I can’t imagine a pre-walking life anymore. I didn’t see walking as an activity, a social thing, a form of exercise, or a fun thing before quarantine. I only saw it as a way of getting from one place to another, and I only walked if I had somewhere to go. Now I do it all the time, just to walk for fun, not to go anywhere. It helps my muscles/joints, it lets me get out in nature and out of my room (very important!), and it is a (relatively) safe way to see someone in person.
I feel like a lot of people talk about how their health has been impacted by the pandemic, but this hasn’t really happened for me that much. My physical health has gotten much worse and also better during the pandemic, and so has my mental health. I had some really bad times, physically and mentally, at the end of the summer, and again in the middle of the fall. But now I’m doing possibly the best, mentally, that I’ve been in years (not 100%, but better!). And physically it’s a mixed bag right now. My health does not seem to be directly correlated with the pandemic.
Anyway… it’s been a year.
Something over Nothing 