March 15, 2020 is a day I don’t think many of us will forget.
I still remember the couple months prior, comforting my friends and coworkers, reassuring them that everything's going to be fine. I was sure it wouldn’t be as serious as it turned out to be because it never happened before.
There’s a first time for everything.
In December 2019, a new virus emerged from Wuhan, China, with the disease spreading quickly throughout the world. That disease became known as the coronavirus.
Attempts to contain the spread failed, and the world quickly realized how contagious the virus actually was.
COVID-19 spreads through droplets and small airborne particles containing the virus, which creates a highly contagious environment for us to exist in along with this disease, according to an article by the World Health Organization.
It was the first time the people in our generation have lived through a pandemic that has affected so much of the world.
A pandemic is an epidemic of a disease spreading through a larger region, specifically multiple continents or worldwide and affecting a significant number of people.
So my reassurances, ended up being totally and completely wrong.
I still think about that time, how no one really saw it coming, including myself.
I remember celebrating my partner’s job as a teacher a few days before the shelter-in-place order, wondering if we even should be at this sushi restaurant to celebrate the fact he didn’t get laid off from work.
Then on March 15, 2020, when California Governor Gavin Newsom ordered bars, restaurants and gyms to close, we realized things were never going to be the same again.
This unease really hit while I was in bed with my partner, on March 19, 2020, reading the news release that was spreading like wildfire on social media telling us the shelter-in-place was starting in Santa Clara County for two weeks.
We almost saw it as a vacation from the grind, work-hard culture, if we weren’t so worried about what was going to come next.
Shelter-in-place, which was supposed to be two weeks, ended up spanning over a seven month ordeal of the entire world completely changing the way we live all of our lives.
All the days during that time blurred, considering the fact that every day really felt the same, trying to survive, trying to cope being inside all the time.
Ironically, it gave me time to focus on things that I wouldn’t be able to focus on prior to the shelter-in-place because of the time I had now that we needed to stay home.
My roommate and I just had our other tenant move in two weeks prior to the shutdown in California. We all got to know each other more because we had to navigate how to pay our rent and live together, while making sure we were taking care of each other during the quarantine.
This time also gave me a chance to reconcile with my mental health and realize I was dealing with something much bigger than depression, having a nervous breakdown which led to a suicide attempt my partner had to drive over and comfort me through.
There were so many things in my life culminating at once, the trauma I had surrounding relationships and housing, while also worrying about where my life was going to go after these two weeks. Would it ever go back to normal?
Those two weeks came and went, and more continued to happen. I was “laid off” from my retail job until further notice. We would get retroactive pay for the weeks we were scheduled to work, but that was all.
The only thing that kept me afloat was the extension to California’s unemployment benefits from the extra funding from the federal government.
I would get $400 dollars a week, plus $600 on top of it every two weeks.
So from then on, I was being paid more than my retail job ever paid me. It was the first time I had ever seen money like that in my account. I actually had disposable income.
I was able to work on my credit, save money for a car, buy a new bed and do so many other things than I was able to before, because this time I had the help most people got from the government.
One of my roommates was able to get unemployment, but my other roommate wasn’t, because of her undocumented status.
Then the reality of the system we live under really started to kick in.
There were multiple stories of landlords trying to evict people from their homes.
People with undocumented statuses were struggling to survive in a world where their income may possibly be lost.
The country was dealing with the virus everyday.
It was so difficult to try to ignore the reality of the situation; thousands of people dying or getting sick daily, reading stories about children who would lose their entire families over the course of a few weeks, and donating to mutual aid funds for people’s funerals or care funds for when they got sick.
It was a horrible scenario knowing that at any minute, this could be my very own reality, worrying about my parents who didn’t live with me, having an immunocompromised mother and a father who is getting older.
I had so many people to worry about while worrying about myself and the community I was a part of.
Not only this, but on May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, sparking protests around the world against police brutality.
It was incredible to watch everyone come together, even in the face of sickness, to protest injustice and inequality in the country.
This is not the first nor last instance of police brutality, and the virus, along with how large and widespread the protests were, showed people taking more of a stance than ever.
Now in 2023, things don’t really feel any different.
Sometimes, I look back at 2020 with a very nuanced nostalgia.
I do miss the disposable income I had, and the peace and quiet I got from not having to work.
But also, the nostalgia leans into what could happen if our government actually cared about what happened to us, what could happen if protests weren’t so largely suppressed in this country.
It seems like now, more than before, with the government and everything relating to work and income, it is becoming harder to imagine a world with healthcare and a safety net in case disasters like the COVID-19 pandemic happen again.
What would society look like if we didn’t live in one of the most carceral and policed countries in the world?
What would happen if we continued to take COVID-19 as seriously as we did then?
People don’t really wear masks anymore, lines at Target and grocery stores aren’t a thing anymore and there’s not much social distancing either.
Vaccines have gotten us to a world where we can go back to normal, but I think there’s still so much we can do to mitigate the spread of a virus that stopped our world for a whole year.
