Coronacation Gone Wrong.

Round 2 of Dalgona Coffee?

W2T1: I often dream about living through a historical event, or at least time-travelling back in time to experience what it was like in the past. As a history buff, I’ve definitely indulged in many books and documentaries about ancient civilisations, and often daydreaming about what it was like to live in those times. The Black Plague was something that I had a weird morbid interest towards and little did I know I would be living through something similar, and somehow making history in one of the world’s largest pandemic.

Now unlike the Victorians’, our healthcare has improved by miles and I have the luxury of being able to stay at home comfortably. While I sit in a position of privilege to be able to live without the worry of money, this little stay-at-home vacation has gone way past its’ best before date. As a family of eight living in a four-bedroom terrace house, my home had never been a real issue of space until we realised this was going to be a long-term thing. Here’s where the real problem began.

As both my parents were working full time, they needed their own space to attend meetings and carry out calls. Both me and my sister are university students hence, we had to take our classes from home as well. My brother is a special needs child and was taking his own classes alongside us and boy is he truly a noise machine. This is where the real congestion began. It was a struggle, both physically and mentally for all of us to work around each other - moving from room to room in order to have some form of privacy and spoiler alert, there really wasn’t any. To add on, my grandparents were also cooped up with us alongside my uncle so the sheer number of people can make the house extremely stuffy.

This extended “coronacation”, in simple words, has been difficult mentally. I love my family but there are times where it becomes extremely difficult to deal with each other, especially cooped up together with nowhere to go. Taylor’s hasn’t been gentle on me either, with my third semester (March 2020) becoming a semester that I had believed that there would’ve been no light at the end of the road. I was piled with assignments that were normally done in groups and the workload and deadlines were pretty much the same as if it were normal. However, that experience made me a lot tougher and stronger when it comes to assignments now, granted it was a very mentally gruelling experience.

As my final semester approaches and the government forcing us into another lockdown, I can safely say my family is a lot more prepared than we were a year ago. We’ve decluttered to make more room for all of us to comfortably take our calls, and I know what it’s like to work fully online with people. Things are looking up slightly but hey, we never know when a mutation will hit and send us all back to square one.