ELLIOTT LOONEY
WELLBEING
WHAT I’VE LEARNED DURING
LOCKDOWN
Elliott Looney, Transition Year student at De La Salle College Churchtown and instigator of the BITAz initiative discusses his lessons from lockdown
How to start. Let’s start at the beginning. A suspenseful, exciting, anticipationfilled day is what I can remember feeling on the 10th of March, the debut day our previous Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, came on to the tv and shockingly announced a full, level 5, lockdown on the whole country to be placed with immediate effect. To be quite frank, I was ecstatic, as were many of my close friends and classmates. It felt like the time when schools closed for one day because of Storm Ophelia. It was “brilliant”. Two weeks of freedom, vacation, movies, late nights, video games, and yes (cough, cough) some studying seeing that I was indeed still en route to take my Junior Certificate exams. So in hindsight, life seemed great in those two weeks. In all honesty, it felt like a vacation. But looking back on it now, it seems like I had got a bit ahead of myself in thinking that…
Where, in the world, are we now? Four..? Five? Six, seven weeks now? In all honesty, I have absolutely no clue how long it’s been, how many weeks it has been of full lockdown. There’s a myriad of strange and unprecedented feelings that I have never experienced before that keep recurring in spontaneous jolts. It seems futile to talk about “how it’s been” isolated inside these four walls when everyone else has also. There is not much you can do in finite space, but most importantly with finite people around you. That’s one thing I’ve learned from the whole pandemic, but more on that later. For now I just want to pour out all that I am thinking about right now onto this Google Doc. It feels like my body isn’t the only thing that’s been trapped inside these four walls, but specifically my mind. Everytime I go for a walk outside, or a run, or on a cycle, or anything outside really, I still feel trapped or shy of the outside world. I feel like my head’s become so used to such limited company and such limited space to essentially live, that all of a sudden my world’s become a lot more independent and for all intents and purposes, lonesome. But, and a big but at that, with all that said, I believe that the pandemic has shaped me into a more improved version of who I used to be. So let’s begin...
Lesson No. 1 The importance of other people The first lockdown, as I mentioned earlier, was fantastic. I was hyper and floating graciously on cloud 9. I was attending my classes, doing my work, texting my friends, adoring the idea of not having to get up, get ready to go out for school, wear my suffocating uniform, always trying to find a niche in the luas to get on with the plethora of other people. The detrimental experience of being glued to the inside of your abode, with a very limited amount of not only things you can do, but people you can see, had not yet sunken into my cute but naive mind. The simple but true fact that human beings need other human beings to survive, had not yet ever come to my attention. Now, thank God that I have my family surrounding me, each of us helping each other out, each and every day through our same struggle, but I especially break at the thought of someone else suffering on their own. I already struggle enough with the lack of seeing my close friends but I also miss just seeing people living life. So in summary, the first lesson that the lockdown has taught me is that life without others isn’t really life at all, and as they say, “You never miss something until it’s gone”, could not be any truer now. 22
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