This pandemic has caused more change than anyone could have ever expected. Things like this don’t always seem to be so concerning until suddenly it flips your whole life around. It changes your whole lifestyle and restricts you from doing the things you usually would.
To me, I only saw people starting to care about or even take the coronavirus seriously, as it started to affect them. It was all a joke until suddenly you weren’t going back to school. Suddenly the events you had been looking forward to for months were cancelled, the things you had been looking forward to were all postponed. The world slowly started to get put on pause as everyone realizes the gravity of the situation.
It was almost maddening to me to see people not care at all until it affected them. It’s only human to be selfish, but it still bothered me nonetheless. I watched my track coach announce to the team — right before Spring Break — that we wouldn’t be going to our track meet because, like most sporting events and other mass gatherings, it was cancelled. And after he had confirmed suspicions, I noticed a girl get upset because this was being taken away from her. She expressed her irritation at this along with all her Spring Break plans being cancelled and how she was mad at the “stupid virus,” but a week earlier she had been joking about catching it and how it really wasn’t even that bad and “the flu kills more people.” I saw a sudden change in her that just didn’t sit right with me. I don’t think she even cared about the seriousness of the pandemic; she was just upset she couldn’t do the things she previously planned.
For me, this pandemic has changed the pace of my life. Before, it felt like I spent more time outside of my house than actually in it. I was always finding a reason to not sit still, and now I’m only ever at home. Somehow, I’m just in a state of not feeling like anything is reality. Everything right now is so starkly different from how it was not even two months ago.
It is such a drastic change that I seem to be losing all sense of priority or even concern. I can’t put into words how frustrating all of it is, but it’s as if all the time and effort I had been putting into things don’t even matter at this point. It feels like things are so different now, that nothing I did before even matters. I’ve spent countless hours working towards a goal. I sacrificed so much free time and so much energy.
There were nights where I questioned how much I was putting into what I was doing and I was waiting for the day it would pay off. But all of a sudden, it’s like we’re in a whole different world and nothing I did before seems to hold any importance. Things feel so different now, and I still haven’t quite found the way to deal with the transition. I’m stuck in a sense of disbelief and cluelessness, yet the world continues on.