This year has been emotionally draining on many levels. Millions of people have been confined to their homes with limited social interaction. After months of social distancing and adapting to a new lifestyle, I found myself experiencing one the symptoms of depression. Feeling upset, hopeless, or sad is a completely appropriate reaction to what is going on in the world right now added to the fear of contracting pandemic, isolation, loss of income, uncertainty about the future, new realities of working and learning from home, temporary unemployment and lack of physical contact with other family members, friends and colleagues was making me so depressed. After a lot of mental breakdowns I finally adapted a few things to make me feel normal like, finding a new habit, helping with house chores and spending some quality time with my family and reducing my internet time really made me feel full of life.
One of the incident that happened during pandemic was when I went to attend the wedding of a really close family member and later we came to know that the virus got spread after that wedding and when we all got our tests done and my grandfather tested positive, we all were so scared because he’s already very weak, and we all faced the consequences. Being in the situation made us realize that we’re still in many blessings. Hospitals are and were filled with Covid patients and there was nothing but the hopelessness. People are still there who cannot afford the expenses and are duly suffering not by th illness but by economic stress. Businesses have been shut down and many are jobless.
When the first lockdown was announced last March, I felt a knot form in my stomach. I was worried about the health of loved ones, our jobs and how long restrictions would be in place. Like many others, I worked, ran and baked to distract myself. For the first few months, I felt OK - believing, perhaps naively - that we might be able to pull ourselves out of this mess by 2021. But as we neared the end of the year, it was clear that this wouldn't be the case. The rollout of vaccines has brought hope, but the crisis is far from over and in many ways, normality feels further away than it did before. In the last few months, I've begun to feel more anxious about the future and what life will be life post-COVID. Although I desperately miss friends and family, the thought of doing activities I once considered normal - like going to gigs and post-work drinks - makes me feel nervous. Seeing local businesses struggling without adequate support, I worry about the instability of work, our livelihoods and the impact on our long-term well-being.
The challenges to which economic cooperation can or must be applied in the present crisis are enormous and have a momentum of their own. The extent of common ground needs to be established, trust needs to be rebuilt, and technical solutions to problems found. The Covid-19 pandemic is expected to impact us for a long time. Millions of children have no access to school and for our already fragile education system this is indeed an unprecedented situation in the history of education. However, we must embrace this unexpected change and apply an alternate approach to ensure continuity in education.
Sidra Zahid
060
MSE-12-B