Tales from Lockdown
My experience not leaving my house
I was exposed to someone who potentially had COVID-19 on March 11th. Since then, I have essentially been self-quarantining, give or take a couple of days. Like the rest of the world, it’s had a fairly large impact on my day-to-day life. In this post, I’d like to talk a little bit about my experience and some observations that I’ve had.
My daily activities now consist of walks, video games, cooking, and chatting with friends and family of video chat platforms like Zoom and FaceTime. But trying to step back, and be semi-positive, it seems that the world is settling in a little bit. Grocery stores are adapting to be more cautious. People are finally taking the situation seriously, and staying home. Although a lot of thought can be put into the past and future, I’m trying to stay present during all this. See the positives of being in quarantine.
Positives
Colorado is one of the greatest places to be in quarantine. Easy access to the outside, a lot of open space available, too many trails and walks to take. I’ve been exploring the trails around my house that I have never been on before. I can walk 10 minutes out of my front door to Settlers Park and Sanitas Trailhead. The ski resorts are closed but there are still plenty of opportunities to escape the craziness and clear your head.
I’ve been able to catch up with people I haven’t seen in ages. I now FaceTime with my brother a couple of times a week. We used to rarely communicate. Today, we had a Zoom happy hour for one of my friends in LA and saw a bunch of people that I hadn’t seen in years.
Observations
I was on Zoom call with my stuttering support group and we were talking about how our speech was affected by doing all these video calls. A couple of interesting observations were mentioned. The first being that for the first time, for a long period of time, for all video calls the person who is speaking can see themselves speak. How will this affect basic conversation? Does this make people more self-conscious about how they speak? How does it affect their reactions?
Also, if you attempt to speak to someone “1-on-1”, instead of only looking at them, you can now see everyone else’s reactions to your speaking. How will this affect normal, day-to-day conversations? Is this sense of intimacy now lost for the time being? There so many subtleties of in-person interactions that are now lost during this era of video calling.
Times are strange, but I find comfort in the fact that not only are all humans going through this together, and that eventually, this will come to an end. And we will emerge stronger and closer than ever. One day at a time is all it takes!
