When I reflect on this past year, it is frightening in a way. The world changed so vastly as the death of hundreds of thousands of people due to some unknown virus ravaged the world. With the uncertain times we have dealt with, we as a society changed. I changed, especially during our national quarantine. Despite all the atrocities, I set goals and exceeded them. This time to myself allowed me to focus on myself, which is a small blessing despite the horrors around us. This is just my experience, and I want to share; I am not here to make light or ignore the world’s state, due to Covid-19. This is just something that gave me the opportunity for change, only as our entire world has.
This allowed me for “me-time,” true-time to myself. It allowed me to reinvent, and truly realize some things. At the beginning of quarantine, my mental health was in shambles. I couldn’t go a week without a panic attack over the smallest things. I hated myself, my body, and didn’t have any true desires. But this time to myself allowed me to think, work and help myself. I got on the right medication, and with that, it jump-started a change.
Quarantine allowed me moments to enjoy the little things, think of actual goals and desires. It allowed me to pick up old hobbies I had forever longed to restart but never could make myself. I began to write again, and with that I entered a contest. It was a contest reflecting on quarantine. I wrote stories and poems and entered with no real goal of winning. It had been so long since I wrote something. I felt as if I lost it; writing is something I feel you can lose if it isn’t worked upon and polished. But to my surprise I won, not second or third, but first. This sent me anew. It was like a message to continue a goal. A goal of a novel that had been dwelling in my mind for an embarrassingly long time. Something four years in the making that I know for a fact I would not have begun if I had not been working on myself.
This of course was not the only thing that happened, it felt as if my rut had been burst at the seams. I began working on my sewing, something I intensely desired to take up and polish for years. I had a multitude of half begun projects which were just lost to a tote, but now that is not the case. I feel almost renewed, and that is a powerful feeling. Although these things are seemingly superficial, to me, they aren’t. The little things can be the most significant. It initiated time to take a step back from this booming and changing world. I hate to seem so pastoral and Romantic towards this seemingly slowdown of time, but it helped me. The good has come with the bad, and it is only the beginning.