How the world changed in a day and how did I manage?
Tags: Covid Diaries, Coping, Routine, Everyday Life, Coping Mechanisms

This is a story of how the world as we know it changed in a day when Covid made landfall in my country. Yes I know I used the world landfall because this was no less than a cyclone. It came one day, took everything in sight, changed everything we had been the day before, and what is worse? We are yet to recover from it.

No, this is not a story of ranting about how Covid affected me, but this is a story of how I coped with the change and how I am still. Covid not only affected people physically, for someone like me it took a toll on me mentally.

Image credit: santima.studio | Getty Images

Let us walk through what my day was pre-covid, and you will understand why!

I got up at 5 AM every day, made myself a hot cup of tea, had a slice of bread or a banana, and got ready in my sports attire. I played badminton for 1.5 hours with my partner and 4 other friends in my community. Came home, bathed, got ready, and had breakfast. Then I dropped my partner at work, drove to the office which is about a 20–25 minutes drive. This was my time to talk to family members, sing along with the radio, just enjoy the drive, and most importantly, the 25 minutes where I was not looking at a device, not thinking about work or anything. The drive just helped to shift my mind from home to work. I was on most days the first to be in the office in my team. I grab a cup of coffee, catch up on emails, read up on news, do a bit of research work, and by 10:30 AM I have done a good amount of work. By now, most folks start slowly coming in, we have team meetings and a bunch of more meetings. We as a team, go for lunch together, talk about world issues and everything but work. Take a 10 minutes stroll post-lunch and then back to work. We do a lot of brainstorming, just finding people in the bay and learning about new things going on in other teams, and by 5 PM I feel like I had quite a productive day. I leave from work, another 25 minutes drive which helps me switch off work and be truly present once I am home. My partner and I start preparing our dinner, this used to be a thing we did together and helped us get time to talk about our day as well without devices in front of us. The dinner is prepared by 7 PM at the latest, we go for an hour walk, come back home and then eat dinner. The dinner is generally taken for lunch the next day as well. We then sit down for some reading, catching up on Netflix shows and by 10 PM we close our day.

I am sure, mine was not a perfect day but I am sure many of you might have connected with it as how your day used to be.

And then the day the first Covid case happened in our city, that evening they shut our badminton courts down. They restricted us from moving around in the community as well, and we had a very strict essential only movement enforced by the Government. And all of sudden, the routine went out the window. We did not know how to cope with it, and we did not know how to work at home while both of us had meetings.

And most importantly, the mental barrier I had between work and the home was destroyed. I was a mess. We as humans might not realize, but we are creatures of habit and routine(at least I am). The sudden break in physical activity made me feel groggy and irritated all day. So, we started a new routine in the who-knows-what times(avoiding the overused terms for Covid times). We woke up a bit later than before, we made it a habit to sit down with our plants, enjoy our mini garden. We had a mental start time and end time for our work hours. We both would sit in a designated place every day and that kind of helped us feel like our own space at home. I was not happily making our home an office, but people were going through worse. So I am not complaining.

We took a lunch break every day at 12, prepared hot lunches (compared to pre covid where we had previous night dinners), enjoyed a good 30 minutes of eating together. We finished our work by 5 PM, prepared tea, had tea together while we sat on our Patio, and looked at things we never did in 3 years of living in that house. We then played badminton inside the house (trust me we really did, only eye-level shots and not too fast), for an hour. We made evening snacks and pleasantly surprised ourselves with our cooking abilities. Pre covid on average we ate out or ordered in food at least two times a week. This was no longer an option, so we had to cook those we ordered in because we felt it was too complex for us to cook like momos, pizza, and whatnot. We made fresh dinner as well and wiped clean everything the same meal itself. We no longer had any older refrigerated food.

In 7 years of being with my partner, this was the longest we ever spent with each other. We stayed, worked, spent each waking minute with each other. This helped us find a new balance, appreciate each other and more importantly, love each other a bit more than before. I know we miss the social gatherings, the ability to meet our family, have some time off from each other from time to time. But, we are also in a way thankful for this. I have had families who appreciated this time for the chance they got to spend time with their children which with a normal office working style did not allow, new parents, got longer than the standard paternity/maternity breaks and people who stayed in a different city for work, got back to their homes and spent the longest time they ever got to spend with their families. This is me, coping with this and also looking forward to a better day each day.