Lessons of Life and Lockdown: A Student’s Perspective
Tags: Mental Health Awareness, New Author, Covid Diaries, Mental Health, Covid 19

Lessons of Life and Lockdown: A Student’s Perspective

Well this year has been a ride hasn’t it? Lockdown, threat of world was 3, being in school during a pandemic, all new experiences, and honestly? I wouldn’t change it.

All the way back in January and February of the mess that has been 2020, when twitter was rife with jokes of world war 3, and nobody could really tell if they were going to become a reality or not, a global pandemic was the last thing on any of our minds.

Then March rolled around.

COVID-19 happened and we all thought that it would go away in a few weeks, and everything would be fine. Oh how wrong we were. In the beginning, news outlets reported that the it would be over in 2 weeks, a month tops. When I see old articles about COVID-19 I chuckle to myself at the sheer absurdity. I used to think we were naive to think it would all be over so soon, but in hindsight, how could we have know better? Most had no idea what a global pandemic was like, but life moves on.

I still remember the day after a lot of the articles were published, it was the only topic talked about school. We were misguided to think that we would maybe have a few weeks off of school, and in a few weeks that’s what happened. I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I didn’t do much those weeks. We were told to stay home and self isolate, which meant we didn’t have to get up stupidly early in the morning to trek to school, so who was I to complain?

But slowly we started to realise that this wasn’t going to be a short term thing. My school scrambled to get work assigned online for us to complete, more on that later, and every time we were told “just another 6 weeks”, we knew we were in for the long haul.

I don’t blame my school for the not-so-great response, because we’ll before that you’d never have to prepare for students to be off for long periods of time, only in exceptional cases. We were sent a block of work, with all the same due date, and told to complete it on schedule with lessons. Apart from the occasional phone call from our form tutor, we didn’t get much help. We were told it is up to us to get all the material covered but, as one can expect from a bunch of teenagers being stuck at home, school work wasn’t the top priority.

I managed to complete the work only due to my worry about being told off when we went back(which they didn’t EVEN ASK FOR, yeah in still salty about that), but it was a slow process. Between distractions from phones and general lack of motivation to do anything, it meant I worked during the weeks I would have half-term.

Then in September, going back to school as a different school year as when we had left, that was quite strange.

Then COVID-19 happened… again.

Logn story short, we all had to self isolate again and now it’s Christmas. Horray.

That’s not to say Lockdown was a complete waste. I learnt a lot about myself. I learnt that I do go slightly stir crazy when I can’t dance for 6 months, and I have a severe lack of patience, and all of that coupled with anger issues and terrible concentration problems. But one thing was positive. I learnt the value of my own and others’ company.

As an introvert, I prefer to be by myself any day. Social gathering are physically draining and I need some me time to recharge my social meter. That’s not to say I don’t like my friends’ company, but most days of rather be alone. But during a pandemic, where I couldn’t see my friends, I was lonely. This was a new feeling for me and it was strange.

If you have something, you don’t realise it’s importance until it’s gone.

I learnt the importance of a support network, and having people in your corner. I’ve spoken about men’s mental health in a different story so to read that but it truly is important to have people fighting for you when you are too weak to fight for yourself.

This brings a story to my mind. My mental health declined and I was very unmotivated to do anything about midway through the 6 months that was lockdown. I confided in a few friends of mine from twitter and every day or so they would check up on me, see how I was doing. I did the same for them. That’s a support network. That’s how we stayed sane, by talking, ranting, laughing, or getting each other to take our minds off of what was troubling us. Healthy coping mechanisms are so important!

Truth time. It’s okay to not be okay, especially in a global pandemic, and don’t be ashamed that your mental health may have gotten worse. It’s normal.

To end off, if you take anything from this story of my life during quarantine, let it be that having a support network and friends supporting friends is so important, and when this pandemic is over, don’t forget about it. Don’t stop checking up on your friends once in a while, just because the pandemic is over doesn’t mean everyone is magically happy again.

Thank you for reading.