Is Quarantine How I Live My Life Anyways?

Quarantine and COVID took over all our lives, yes, but did my life really change during COVID? Now, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t the biggest fan of lockdown and even though all I wanted to do most days was go out and meet my friends, I think lockdown was easy for me to adjust to; I am a homebody at heart. I love staying home and just laying in bed with a good book all day, or binge-watching a funny show with my family, and quarantine had me doing a lot of that.

During the first few months of India being in lockdown, I was virtually attending school in Seattle, which meant I was on Pacific Standard Time. I only saw my family for about 4 hours a day and the rest of the night I spent doing classes, homework, and then reading a ton of books. I’m an avid reader. I love all books but I lean towards fantasy and romance fiction more than anything else. School requires a lot of non-fiction reading, so when it comes to reading for pleasure, I like to read fiction so that I have a distinct divide between required reading and reading I do just for myself. My days consisted of spending some time with my family, attending class, doing homework, and then reading or watching some TV. At that point, I was reading anywhere between 20-30 books a month and I was living the dream. I’m still reading close to 20 books a month and it’s all because of how much I read during the lockdown in Mumbai. All I ever wanted to do was binge-read books without any distractions and here I’d been given time to do just that, so yes, I was thriving in lockdown. 

There was just one drawback, I had no one to talk to about these books that I was reading and loving. Most of my friends don’t read and even the friends that do read, don’t read everything that I read. I wanted to be able to talk about these books that I was enjoying so much. So I did the only thing that I could in a pandemic- I turned to social media and I set up an Instagram blog so that I could talk about books with other people who enjoyed the same books as I did. 

When I wasn’t reading or doing school, I was playing board games with my family and spending so much time with them. My brother and I watched all the Marvel Movies in release order and then roped our parents into watching them with us. I rewatched some of my favorite TV Shows and discovered some new ones, I spent a lot of time on FaceTime with my friends and family, but after a while, I didn’t miss being outside anymore. I’ve always been the kind of person who likes to stay at home instead of going out, to order take out instead of eating at a restaurant, to spend some time alone reading or watching TV instead of going out to parties and I realized that I didn’t entirely hate the way my life was during the lockdown. Of course, I did miss going out on occasion and I missed my friends and family, but I didn’t mind being at home much. It made me think that maybe being in lockdown was the way I lived most of my life anyway because I was so comfortable with the way we were living. 

This realization pushed me to decide that I would start to do things that I do not normally do when things start going back to normal, like going out to dinner or a movie on Friday nights instead of ordering takeout and watching a movie on my laptop when I’m back at school. It made me decide that I want to start living life fuller and create more experiences that I can look back on fondly. Quarantine may have been how I lived my life before, but I think that’s something that I want to change. Overall, Quarantine and COVID have been revelatory for me. It rekindled my love for reading, it pushed me to blog about books, it gave me so much time with my family, it taught me to cherish the little joys of being able to go out to lunch with my friends and made me rethink the way I want to live my college life. Quarantine has had its drawbacks and I still miss my friends dearly, but it hasn’t been all bad.

Tell me about your Quarantine experience. What were the best and worst parts of it for you?

Until next time,

Sanj.