Items

• 2022-04-29

  Depression during a Pandemic

  The COVID-19 pandemic has been one the hardest things for me to deal with. I suffer from depression and often combat this by spending time with friends and family. Before the pandemic I would often spend my weekends with friends and visit my family after work on half of the weekdays. Throughout the pandemic, until recently it has been rather unacceptable to spend time in close contact with others. In the being of the pandemic during the first shutdowns and mandates I struggled deeply with having to stay home all the time. I became quite depressed and would often just sleep through my days off. I tried to do virtual hangouts with my friends and family, but it just wasn’t the same. I ended up planning socially distanced hangouts with my friends, often picnics/lunch in the park 6 feet apart. This really helped me because I was able to socialize with them in person. As the pandemic progressed, and I wasn’t able to see friends nearly as often as before I became more comfortable with being alone. I started to find the things I enjoyed doing on my own. I took time to really work on some of the issues I had been avoiding. I used the time I was forced to be alone in a productive way. Although the pandemic challenged my way of living, I still found a way to grow. Now that we are starting to get a better handle on the virus, life is slowly starting to return to what it was before. With the release of vaccines I have been able to start seeing my friends and family again. With the lower rate of cases a lot of the business I used to visit are reopening. As we start to return to “normal” I’ve found my new normal and I quite enjoy my alone time, just as much as the time I spend with others.
• 2020-07-01

  Summer baking

  Over summer i quickly realized that there was not much i needed to or could do during the midst of a quarantine. So i used it as an opportunity to just have more alone time. I would wake up sometime at night, go downstairs and bake something or even just listen to music if i was feeling lazy. Then I slept through the rest of the day. It was extremely fun to just reverse my sleep schedule without much consequence. It was also fun to fail a bit at cooking without anyone being awake to judge me. Sometimes, i wore halloween makeup out of boredom, and again, no one to judge. I still miss having so much time to myself to just recharge and be silly.