COVID, The Person I Was, and The Person I Am

This is just a spontaneous blog, it doesn't count toward my monthly blog challenge series whatchamacallit. I've just finished lunch with my university chaplain and parish priest (both the same guy, not 2 different people), this came up in the conversation, and I wanted to write about it. Chances are, this will be short compared to my other writings, but because it's more recounting important personal history than simply providing an update, this will not be a bulletin.

All in all, COVID could have been a lot worse for me. I've definitely noticed a lot of its after-effects in my current life, including my general increase in voluntary isolation compared to my more chatty personality beforehand - even if I did previously express sadness at feeling lonely at the age of 11 thanks to my autism presenting a huge social roadblock, and every social interaction feeling horribly superficial - but it could've been far, far worse than what actually came about, due to the following circumstances:

1. We had just moved house for the first time a few months before lockdown started, and I, an autistic 14-year-old girl (13 at the time of moving) was not coping well with it, already feeling far more lonely than before after having to quit my favourite meetups and groups (local Stagecoach, "Friday Group" home-ed meetup, local Girls' Brigade). In effect, I was no longer able to consistently see any of my few friends, and while we did have Skype calls in the height of the pandemic, these petered out over time, as did our friendship.

2. Outside of nursery, my year abroad in Rome, and university, I have always been home-educated, and I was highly used to independent, home-based study.

3. Because I was in my early teens, I was no longer in my "girls win boys go in the bin" phase, and was "reconciled", if you will, with my brothers.

4. In June of 2019, I made my first social media debut (outside of Scratch in January of 2016) via Fandom, and broadened my horizons to Wattpad in November of that same year, thus integrating myself into the Go Jetters fandom that would carry me through the pandemic and shortly after.

5. We had moved to this house in order to become closer to a certain group of people, but I was very quickly made aware that these people did not care for me much at all, as much as they might have believed otherwise. They were, and still are, a very close-knit community, and were prone to excluding other people from their social gatherings and parties as a direct result of this lifestyle.

Thus, when the lockdowns came in March of 2020, the main thing I missed was the ability to go out on walks every couple of days, and making use of the several public footpaths leading into the National Trust-owned land. The real-life people my family wanted to grow close to made my mum and I feel grossly unwelcome, which then only pushed me further online, and because I'd already made friends in the forms of TheNeonBunny (at the time) and Goldskyeagle and Official_Puro (at the time), among others, I didn't mind so much. I even was asked on a Tellonym (which I had at the time) about my experiences with COVID, and I simply said that I wasn't affected all that much, which is definitely what it felt like at the time.

That said, there was definitely something happening; I became almost obsessed with having Discord open all the time, possessive of the family laptop, addicted to Roblox, and essentially all I wanted to do became tied to something online, whether it was content or friendships. I remember there was this one low point, after they allowed people to go outside on a walk or for exercise once a day, and on that day's walk I felt the closest I've ever been to depression. I doubt it was anything like the real deal, as I don't like to immediately jump the gun and say I have X mental illness because I'm feeling a little under the weather, but the feeling I felt was depressing. It was related to insecurities about not being able to make real-life friendships because of my autism making me wholly alien to the local group I mentioned earlier, and while I doubt that was the full cause, there's definitely something to be said about that.

I only clocked that COVID was fully over in August of 2022. I remember thinking "oh, everything's gone back to normal now", and while things aren't the same, it was a very welcome sense of normalcy. By the time that happened, we'd moved house again, but even further away... not that I particularly minded this time around, I was still feeling a sort of dull presence of the sadness of the first move still there, and the only thing I cared about from the previous place was the walking paths, where a lot of thinking was done. I was no longer so attached to the family laptop, especially since we now each had a computer from my dad's office that he stopped renting, but there was still definitely the problem of overt addiction to the internet, and it was only when I stumbled upon the likes of SpaceHey and the Reject Convenience YouTube channel that I actively started working on that. It has come at the cost that I have made it harder for myself to form such close friendships online as those of the pandemic and the immediate aftermath, but I do realise that real-life friendships are preferable, so it's not too bad.

One problem regarding that, that developed from house-rotting in 2020-2021 (as opposed to bed-rotting... get it? No? Never mind), is the aforementioned self-isolation. I could lock myself in my bedroom and entertain myself for hours on end, whether it's listening to music and imagining sick AMVs and animation memes, watching YouTube videos, playing Roblox (which I don't do so much anymore) or Polytoria or Animal Jam, posting on forums and reading them, Wikipedia rabbit holes, Minesweeper practice, reading, drawing, writing stuff... the list goes on. I am still attached to the internet to this day, even if I've managed to curb it somewhat, and I certainly don't mind skipping some socials if it means I can send my next roleplay post, do my music thing, maybe make an actual animation meme after knowing about them for over 6 years, draw reference sheets for my characters, or even make progress on my website. Socialising has gotten easier with practice, I'm slowly getting the hang of extending my answers beyond 2-3 words, guessing what extra information people want but don't mention when they ask me what I'm studying, asking questions to keep the conversation going, but it's still awkward and difficult, especially when people like to congregate in the late evenings, which is typically time I assign as my personal time after a long day's work. You could argue that these aren't really COVID-related, but I'd respond by saying that even if I were to wind up neck-deep in online fandoms, the pandemic both amplified its effects and sped up the process - and now I'm dealing with the repercussions of that, the good and the bad.

...well never mind, this was not short. Short for my standards, perhaps (looking at you, S Club review), but absolutely not for other people. Whoops.

Yours truly, December Winterwolf