CALLUM SKEFFINGTON

THREE MONTHS AGO, THE

WORLD was dizzy with panic and fear over the coronavirus. We were running around grabbing packs of toilet roll and bags of pasta like the zombie apocalypse was imminent, but the end of the world turned out to be endless zoom quizzes and baking banana bread.

There is no denying that 2020 has been a weird year, and we are only half way through. At the beginning of the year, when we were toasting to a fantastic new year filled with travel and fun and parties and happiness, we had no clue there would soon be a pandemic sweeping across the world, shutting down countries and economies. That was only six months ago, and it feels like an eternity. In another six months we will be coming to the end of 2020, and I think we will all be able to agree that this has not been our year.

Much like J.K. Rowling, 2020 has been cancelled.

Lockdown has been easy in certain ways; it’s not exactly demanding or taxing in any way to be sitting at home and watching TV, reading a good book or rekindling a passion for a hobby that has been neglected over the years. I was furloughed for six weeks, and I felt like I was a teenager again, on my summer holidays with nowhere to go and nobody to hang out with besides my cats and my family. In that time I binged watched so many movies and TV shows. I have watched movies and shows that I have never watched

2020 HAS BEEN A WEIRD YEAR.

before, I have rewatched my favourites, and I’ve watched shows that I had lost interest in, only to lose interest all over again. I have read several books, I was writing a lot, and I have honestly never walked so much in my life, but still the mentality of lockdown has been extremely difficult.

Staying at home, working from home, exercising at home; it’s all blending into one ambiguous realm where time does not exist and the world outside these four walls is a familiar mystery. Can you believe that it has only been three months since Tiger King was released?

Lockdown has been hard, I’m sure most will agree, to stay in all the time and to limit our social activity to facetime and phone calls. I have found it hard to motivate myself to do anything productive at times. I would wake up at seven and wait until eleven before crawling back into bed, only to stare at the same four walls, because I was finally, truly, understanding the lyrics of “I’m just a kid” by Simple Plan. I would be convincing myself that the distant chorus of clapping each Thursday at 8pm was for me; cheering me on as I was lip syncing in front of the mirror before sashaying into the shower, readying myself for yet another zoom quiz, because I was feeling starved of legitimate social interactions beyond my immediate family. I was missing my boyfriend like crazy. I was missing my friends. I was, and I still am, missing my life before lockdown began.

Now that the government has started to ease the restrictions, it has been possible to see my friends and my boyfriend again, and I no longer feel like I am banging my head up against the wall with boredom. Life is slowly starting to begin again.

When I was writing my last column, the coronavirus was rapidly becoming an intensely terrifying part of our lives. The world was shutting down and the government was seemingly incapable of giving us clear direct instructions. Workplaces were chaotic and uncertainty filled our days, but now we are experiencing the relaxment of the restrictions and we are a little bit closer to the end of the COVID-19 lockdown. There is still a lot of uncertainty, with the government announcements being just as vague and ambiguous as before. Some people are feeling anxious whilst others are happy; I am a bit of both. Thankfully, the initial madness of the lockdown is far behind us, and we are nowhere near as terrified and scared now as we ease our way out of lockdown into what will become our ‘new normal.’ The real question is, what will this new normal look like?

If you are looking forward to coming out of lockdown and everything immediately reverting back to the way they were before, you should probably think again. Things definitely won’t just snap back to how they were before.

Social distancing will remain. Face masks are in the season. Restrictions will continue to be eased, and hopefully they will not need to be imposed again.

I know that I will be working from home for the foreseeable future. My home will also continue to be my office at least until August, though I am hoping to soon be back in an actual gym rather than my garage. When the gyms do reopen, it will be like New Years take two, and they will be packed out for the first month, especially with social distancing still enforced. I would imagine that gyms will be trying to implement a mandatory booking system, just like hairdressers and barbers. I will likely avoid getting my haircut for a while, since every person in the country will be flocking to the salons the very second they reopen.

Maybe this is our chance to reinvent what we consider to be our normal lives. The new normal may even be a better normal. I know for myself personally, I will no longer be letting the unimportant things rule my life and stress me out. I am sometimes prone to allowing work stresses to overpower my mental health. I can also sometimes drain myself socially and push myself too much to be overly productive at times when I’m feeling unmotivated, and if this whole experience has taught me anything, it’s that I should be finding and focusing on the simple joys in amongst all of the chaos of everyday life.

This is an opinion piece from the columnist/contributor and not the opinion of GNI MAG / Romeo & Julian Publications Ltd.