Five Things I Started Doing During The Pandemic And Why I’ll Keep Doing Them After It Ends
Between COVID, our toxic political climate, internet filth and the uncertainty about the future, the world today can sometimes feel like we’re also playing the squid game.
Since the beginning of the corona virus pandemic, I have maximized family time by bonding with my newborn niece, finished almost every project and starting new ones, deep cleaned every crevice of my apartment, and taken more hikes than Reese Witherspoon in Wild. Twenty months later, and unsure of when we’ll ever get back to ‘normal’ I’m still doing all the above things but recently, I’ve stumbled into five new ways to make this pandemic a little more bearable.
1. Hulla Hoop
When I was a child growing up in Thika, Kenya, my friends and I would scour dumpsites for discarded bike tires and use them as hula hoops. We would hold friendly competitions around the neighborhood to see which crew had the best skills. Not to brag, but I, errhmm, our crew was the champ. We were experts at swinging the hula hoops around our waists, necks, and arms.
Years later, as a fully formed adult living in Los Angeles amidst a global pandemic, I decided to start hula hooping as a fun way to combat some of my pandemic weight gain. However, instead of raiding dumpsters for hula hoops, I got them where I get everything else. Amazon. Even though these ones are weightless, bright colored and plastic, they’re just as fun. And to my surprise, my skill level is almost as epic as it was when I was kid.
2. Binge-watching supernatural shows
Reading the newspaper, watching the news and getting constant news alerts on my iPhone leaves my mind vacillating bewteen a deep depression and severe anxiety. To combat these effects and hopefully avoid a total meltdown, I’ve started limiting my consumption of the news and instead, began binge-watching supernatural shows. Getting lost in mystical worlds where magic fixes everything is just the right kind of medicine to keep my mind at peace. So far, I have binged-watched The Adventures of Sinbad, The Originals, Angel, True Blood and Teen Wolf.
If you’ve never watched supernatural shows or just don’t like them, I’d suggest starting with The Vampire Diaries or Charmed. These two cultural icons do a great job of using romance, friendships and familial ties to ease first timers into the wonderful world of magic. I promise they will have you hooked like I am. I finished the first three seasons of The Vampire Diaries in two weeks, while also managing to get a ton of writing and hair braiding done.
3. Journaling
When I was younger, I used to keep a small diary where I would jot down all my daydreams about whatever cute boy I liked at my school, which girls were being mean to me and how I really felt about my some of my mom’s gossipy friends. Like a one hit wonder from the 90s, the habit fizzled as I got older. Now, thanks to plenty of down time courtesy of the corona virus, I’ve picked up journaling again. Except this time instead of a pen and pad, I use my laptop. Not only is it proving to be cathartic, but I’ve developed a second use for the journaling process: relearning Kiswahili. My family relocated to America from Kenya almost twenty years ago. Since we converse in our native language, Gĩkũyũ, that language hasn’t been lost but my second language, Kiswahili, went from fluent to sounding like a tourist. So when I started journaling again, I decided to use Kiswahili. It was hard at first and I was using Google Translate for every other word but now it flows more organically. I feel really proud when I manage to write an entire entry without looking up the translation.
Even if you don’t have an alternative language you’re trying to re-learn, journaling can still be beneficial. It doesn’t matter if it’s a whole chapter or only one line stating the day was crap or writing down what you’re thankful for. Do it anyway. And if you don’t like writing, Microsoft Word and your iPhone have a dictation feature. And if you don’t like that either, video journaling is always a great alternative. Just don’t forget to not post it on social media.
4. Collaging
Like a lot of you, I haven’t done collaging since high school. I recently picked it up when I was looking for a way to fill up the empty wall spaces in my apartment. I chose to collage with magazine photos of different Black models and actresses. In addition to ending up with a beautifully decorated wall, the entire process inspired my article The Spaces For Black Beauty.
The fun thing about collaging is that you can pick any images you like or inspirational quotes or family pictures or just random things that have no relation to each other. And if you draw, paint or color like I do, you can cut and collage those as well. My art might never make it to a fancy museum in Paris but I love that it’s mine and how awesome it looks on my walls.
5. Creating a family tree
As a child in Kenya, I was fortunate to grow up surrounded by a very large extended family so keeping up with who is who, traditions, and expectations was easy. However, since my nuclear family came to America twenty years ago, some of those ties haven’t been as easily accessible as they once were. So, with the help of my parents, I decided to use this extra time during the pandemic to create a family tree.
During this process, I’m learning so much cool family stuff such as why we have the names we do and how we once lost the family land, but later we successfully acquired more. Perhaps the most shocking thing I’ve learned is that not only are curses a real thing in our family but the misfortunes of certain members are because of a curses placed on them by other family members.
Regardless of how much you already know about your family, doing a genealogy comes with benefits such us, medical knowledge, deep personal identity, family connections, social benefits, mental stimulation and an invaluable gift to future generations.
