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numb
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2020-07-08
Motherless Immigrante Through Covid-19
Before the covid-19 pandemic, I immigrated with my father to the U.S. after my mom's death. It was a fresh beginning, I was living like in a dream, exploring, and being mesmerized by how beautiful and advanced LA is. However, one day everything changed and a lockdown that was supposed to last for 2 weeks, ended up lasting more than a year. At first, it was fun. I was looking at the positive side, doing times I haven't done in a while, watching movies and shows with my dad was incredible fun. However, with time my dad started to worry because he lost his job and did not receive any type of help. He eventually find a job for the summer, but I had too much time by myself that everything I could do was miss my mom. There were days that I didn't see my dad for the entire day because he needed two jobs to be able to pay our expenses and his dad's expenses outside the country. I started to get depressed. School started again but my cheerful character and interest in school never came back. Now, I feel like I am in airplane mode all the time. -
2019
Men In The Mirror
These are all doodles I made during the pandemic when I felt myself crashing, self-sabotaging, or just critical condition emotionally. The drawing on the left is the most recent drawing I made. It shows that I have a heart that is depressed and a mind that is rotting away with a confused face. In the background, you also see the word help radiate from me. This symbolizes how I feel about my education. I feel like, during the pandemic, I'm not able to bounce ideas back and forth on my own, so being alone, I get lost and overcrowded. The one on the top right also expresses my view of myself. It shows that I have a bright flame that either gets drowned with depression or fueled with anger. This relates to the pandemic because when everything got shut down, I Felt very divided with what I was doing and who I was. Lastly, the bottom right picture shows me at a table looking at my hands with a bowl of fruit and pills. This was drawn about halfway through my fall 2020 semester because I have focused on medication. Still, they made me also feel emotionless and more confused about my own personal identity and where my heart was with my art if I can't express it. After this drawing, I became numb and ended up not doing most of my finals and leaving me empty for a while during winter break. The only thing that got me out was seeing my family again after seven months of not really seeing anyone close to me. I also stopped taking meds and had a withdrawal effect at the begging of my spring semester. Now I'm just trying to keep my head up to return to normalcy and see my friends that closely monitored me before knowing how I get affected by certain things. -
2020-09-14
Remote Learning
I had stared virtual learning with a good mindset... I would get to be home all day, have no homework, and do whatever I wanted to. I very quickly realized that was not the case, I was occupied with siblings and pets all day, had at least double the work, and spent most of my day on a device. Honestly online school has been horrible. I resorted to social media as my only distraction, I would scroll through TikTok for hours; I related to a lot of creators which brought me some hope that I wasn't the only one with the feeling of drifting away from society, but the second I put my phone down it all came fooding back. Eventually this new lifestyle was normalized and I was numb. If I had to name this chapter of my childhood, it would be loop. Every single day was the exact same pointless routine, I was wasting my life almost. I have learned a lot learning remotely, and am in a way grateful, but also disappointed, yet still very confused about my final take on things. I changed a lot, but I think for the better. Lost and made friendships. Cried and laughed both a great amount of times. Felt nothing. Felt everything. -
2020-07-01
“I just feel rage”: 6 stories from around the world of surviving Covid-19
From the article: "To help combat the numbing, here are a few people’s stories of surviving Covid-19, in their own words. These patients live in Nigeria, Spain, Iran, England, Italy, and New Jersey, and they each had different experiences with their medical systems. Some health institutions have clearly responded better than others." Because COVID-19 is a global pandemic, it is important to include resources in this archive that compare and contrast different experiences with COVID-19 across the globe. This article is also important because it argues for a shift in how we describe the trauma of COVID. Author Lois Parshley argues that we are currently facing a crisis with "psychic numbing", a process in which our brains struggle to comprehend the sheer amount of sickness, death, and trauma. Parshley argues that while people struggle to understand the tangible impact of a statistic like "125,000 deaths", they are more likely to be receptive and compassionate when presented with individual stories. In other words, whether it be callous politicians or skeptical family and friends, people are more likely to take COVID seriously when they are presented with individual accounts of suffering rather than statistics.