WERKING FROM HOME Staying home means that experimentation with self-expression, style, and new hobbies takes place in solitude now more than ever before
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t is something no one expected. One day you are sitting down with friends and family playing games and watching movies and seven months later you are laying in bed with an existential feeling of loneliness, wondering if this will ever end. How could life just stop and how were we supposed to adjust to spending all of our time alone with our own thoughts? I remember the first few weeks of quarantine, I baked almost everything you could think of from apple pies to croissants. I even tried a couple of TikTok trends and made whipped coffee at midnight, causing my sleeping schedule to be virtually non existent. After about four weeks of sitting in my room and trying to busy myself with miniscule tasks, I had to face my own thoughts and sense of loneliness. Facetime and Zoom calls could only cure my isolation for so long before the foreboding idea that this pandemic would never end. No one wants their youth taken away from them, and as a college student who is trying to start the rest of their life, this year has caused a lot of unknown chaos that everyone is trying to figure out on their own. Living in the unfamiliar, people have looked to the things they know to provide a sense of comfort along with discovering things about themselves that they haven’t had time to explore. “I started painting a lot during
BY BAILEY RUOLO quarantine. I found that it was a really good way for me to put my feelings onto something tangible. I also started studying astrology and numerology a lot more. Studying different elements of spirituality also really helped me gain a better sense of who I am,” says IU college student Grace O’Brien. “Painting definitely served as a way for me to express myself during quarantine. I also used Pinterest a lot to start visualizing different areas of my life and things that I wanted to work on post quarantine. My favorite way to express myself is through the clothes that I wear and I found that during quarantine I was able to hone in on a specific style that suits me best,” O’Brien went on to say. It is hard to put into words how quarantine felt because everyone had their own, dif-
ferent experience but O’Brien phrased it well. “Being alone teaches you a lot about yourself, and it forces you to be your own friend. Even though quarantine was extremely difficult at times, I feel that if I hadn’t had that time to myself then I wouldn’t be the same person I
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