Do not ask me how my summer went. All I will say “Good! How was yours?”. I’m lying. It is so much more complicated than that.
My summer was filled with high highs and extreme lows. Everything I was looking forward to was canceled, everyone I wanted to hang out with was quarantined, and I couldn’t do anything about it.
I’m writing this in order to put a positive spin on what I’ve been through. I want to know if the months of little to no social interaction and constant intake of information from the media have done me any good at all. Am I better off than I was six months ago?
Feelings are weird
Quarantine took a toll on my mental health, as I’m sure it did with everyone. I felt very deeply about missing out on the final months of my junior year at MSA. For me, MSA is a safe, happy place where I live and work alongside friends and can create freely. Sure, I have freedoms at home and can create there if I wish, but it’s just not the same. The atmosphere of MSA is unique to it alone and being deprived of it kinda sucked.
Along with MSA, a lot of other summer activities that I was looking forward to were canceled due to COVID. My family had planned to take a trip to Washington D.C., I had planned to help with the summer children’s show at my local theatre, and I wanted to take my friends on a road trip for my birthday! Suddenly we couldn’t take a plane anywhere, the theatre canceled the summer show, and my birthday party happened over Skype.
I guess in a way I was mourning. I had lost the last bits of my junior year and most of my summer to something completely out of my control. Sometimes I felt bad about feeling bad. Thousands of people were (and still are) mourning loved ones who lost their lives to COVID, so me not getting the birthday celebration I wanted really shouldn’t have been a big deal.
The thing is though, I was allowed to be upset about it. The way the world works, people will always have it better or worse than I do, and I really can’t change that. So I was allowed to feel bad when I can’t go back to school. I’m allowed to feel bad about the bad things that happen to me.
I understand that this may seem obvious to some people. Maybe you’ve lived your life just being able to feel whatever you what to whenever you want to. If so, good for you! But for me, it’s harder to recognize my feelings, accept them, and move on. After quarantine though, the process has become a lot easier!
I kinda like me now?
When you spend a lot of time with yourself, you realize a lot of things you didn’t before. For instance, I’m a very affectionate person. I did not realize how much I depended on physical affection until I stopped receiving it. I thought that the occasional hugs from my family would be more than enough, but I was surprisingly mistaken. It’s kinda cool to know that even though you’ve been suck with yourself all your life, you can still learn new things about yourself.
I also spent a lot of my time in pajamas with no makeup. I’m a very self-conscious and the idea of leaving my house with no makeup used to rattle me quite a bit. But after the months in quarantine with no makeup ever on, I became used to it. After a while longer, I finally stopped wearing makeup for the wrong reason. Well, the wrong reason for me. There is absolutely nothing wrong with using makeup to cover blemishes or lighten dark circles or anything else like that. But when I used to do that, it became less of me covering up the occasional pimple and more of me wanting to change everything about my face. It got to a point where I seriously didn’t enjoy looking at it without makeup on. However, over quarantine, I seemed to have made peace with my face as is. I can’t change it, so I’m going to love it as is. Now when I wear makeup, I wear it as a way of expressing myself.
Overall, I enjoyed the time I spent with myself. Sure there were more lows than highs, but now I know that I can make it through and come out stronger. It makes me so much more appreciative of myself and who I am. If I can make it through months of quarantine during a global pandemic, then I can make it through a heck of a lot more!
So to answer my question, I think that I am better off now than I was six months ago!
I have always liked you, but I’m glad you like you too!! 🙂
In all seriousness though, I am proud of you, and I felt and experienced a lot of the same things you did, and somehow I thought I was the only one ??
First of all, I am so glad to see another blog from you. Your blogs are always incredibly interesting and a bit relatable. I am quite surprised that you are media (multi-talented!). I definitely appreciated reading your thoughts about the extended break. It was quite an odd “summer” for me as well. But I loved your positive spin on it as well as your mention that, even though its hurt pales in comparison to so much recent tragedy, missing expected events sucks…and so does near-isolation for six months. Thank you for yet another intriguing, meaningful post, and I greatly appreciated your message.