FEATURE Changing Our Normal

Firdose Khan, 13

// CHANGINGOURNORMAL

Pre-COVID me wouldn’t recognize me now — I’ve changed and I am grateful to say that I have changed for the better. I hit a milestone last year, beginning my first year of high school. If you asked me two years ago what I thought it would be like, a description of me sitting in my room in front of two screens all day is the last thing that would come to mind. But God gave us this situation for a reason. I was bitter about it at first, but there’s no denying that it has taught me so many things.

We have learned the value of patience, for one. In Ontario, we have been through so many lockdowns, each time not knowing how long it would last. We learned to be adaptable. Before COVID-19, I do not think I was as willing to embrace change as I am now.

We have learned not to limit ourselves to what is right in front of us. Because of COVID-19, we’ve had to basically relocate our entire lives to the Internet. There are many opportunities I was granted this year because they were online and people that I have met through them that I would not have met otherwise.

Perhaps the biggest lesson for me is that I learned to appreciate things while we still have them. Even annoying things like lockdown. We will never have as much free time as we do right now. We have our youth, as annoying as it may be to grow up during these times.

I learned just how strong I am. Just how strong the people around me are, as well as the value of community and how — even when we cannot be together — we can find ways to connect.

Looking back, I was not in the best place mentally in March 2020. The world was not in the best place either and I do not think it has been for awhile. This has been a scary wake-up call for everyone from country leaders to health ministers to me, a teenage girl who learned not to take things for granted.

Personally, I would not want to go back to being the same person I was before COVID-19 started. I think this time has been important for everyone’s development.

A lot of people’s ‘true colors’ came out during this time. Due to this, I got to learn who my real friends were, the people who would try to stay in touch with me when proximity was no longer the thing bonding us. In a way, this time has cleansed us of the unnecessary things in our lives, forcing us to strip down to the bare essentials of education or work. It has led us to re-evaluate what and who we really need in our lives. I feel like everything we do is more intentional now, especially communication.

I am both terrified and excited about things ‘going back to normal’, because how normal can we be after this period of change? This chapter of self reflection? This time that was a series of unfortunate events, but also necessary ones? This year that opened our eyes to both the world’s problems and possibilities?

I think that before we can go back to normal, we need to ask ourselves what that normal looks like for us as individuals. What parts of this pandemic-changed world do we want to keep? Society was flawed before this and will always be flawed, but we can still change our actions to make the world a little better for ourselves and those around us.

So I ask you, how have you changed this year? What have you learned about yourself, others, or the world? Do you think we can redefine what ‘normal’ looks like to ourselves and to our world?

Amani Omar, 19

Visual Artist, Writer, and Spoken Word Poet

The Kudu Chieftess was a piece I used to break out of an art block. It combined both heritage and my love of fantasy together into a piece that reminded me of my childhood love for magical girls like Sailor Moon and Tokyo Mew Mew. In a sense it also captured the idea of my own “animal” magical girl idea I thought of as a child but in a way that was true to me and not just a carbon copy of Japanese anime. The Kudu Chieftess is the representation that I always craved for, that I finally started to make into reality.