My Life Before the Pandemic

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My Life Before the Pandemic

I remember that a week before the pandemic started, I had come out of an interview; they had accepted me to do my Internship at the New York-Presbyterian; I was very excited because I was about to graduate in my Major which is Human Services. My life had been super interesting because I studied and worked at the Bronx Community College, and above all, I was very active. I was in the gym and I had an almost perfect social life. Wonderful people surrounded me; I had so many plans for my graduation. I was planning for trips I wanted to go and they included trips to Mexico and the Dominican Republic to celebrate my graduation. I had many dreams, goals and trips that never happened.

I am crying writing this. I remember when the pandemic entered, it was as if I was in a horror movie; the news every day was negative. They presented thousands of people who lost families; I was fortunate that in my family, no one died. I had a lot of panic about going out to the streets. I remember that my family and I had to line up at the supermarket to buy items. We did not accept visitors; I began to go into a severe depression and I did not want to go through it because it was unfortunate and desperate; I loved the life I had before the pandemic.

Social isolation during the pandemic (COVID 19) has affected many people. Social isolation has negatively impacted many people in the last 18 months. This virus has caused many problems such as anxiety, family separation, unemployment, and depression. Many remember watching the news on how to overcome these problems. It was a Sunday, May 17th; I heard Governor Andrew M. Cuomo on the news talk about how “The crisis (COVID-19) can be a mental health crisis.”

During the pandemic (COVID 19), I remember that anxiety has manifested itself in different ways, both physically and emotionally. One of them is the concern about protecting yourself from the virus and the risks. Some people reacted in a paranoid way with great panic, intense and excessive worries and fears as well as being constantly aware or frequently worried about the situation of facing death in the blink of an eye. Anxiety in other people can become intense and was portrayed as a panic attack. For example, I felt so mentally weak that I couldn’t control my worries in my case. Also, I couldn’t even fall asleep. As a result, it made me feel so stressed that the news made me worse; that is, very worried and sad.

I went through a severe depression. I called my doctor. She told me that one of the best solutions to deal with anxiety in this challenging time with the virus is to avoid watching the news. This habit of watching the world to find out how a country or the world is going through regarding this virus was not an excellent remedy to cure anxiety as many people did it. On the other hand, others say that the best way to control your stress is by praying all day and getting more sleep, or going to the park to exercise following the rules of social distancing. The media is the first to spread anxiety throughout the country. US citizens were at home just watching TV. This large amount of time on television was being taken advantage of by disseminating statistics of how many people die from Covid19 every day.

The news is a source of anxiety and a problem for many people. This is because a lot of people try to navigate into bringing their lives together, and the news talks about how the world is worried about where covid 19 will take the world to (Gao et al, 2020). It is a problematic situation since many people during the covid 19 got depressed. Television and other media have been a great source of anxiety, and many other issues related to them have affected people during the coronavirus period. Just like I got stressed and depressed, many other people experienced the same, and it has been a great source of problems.

The media should have done the best thing to instill hope into the people. Even though they are supposed to report the truth, they cannot tell how many people are dying every minute instead of helping people deal with the issues which are affecting them during this period of coronavirus; therefore, it is an important thing that the media should have come to help people dealing with stress and an abrupt change in the way of life. This is an important part of everyday life and the media should be more inclined towards helping the people instead of just reporting the news without focusing on the effects the news will have on its audience.

Reference

Gao, J., Zheng, P., Jia, Y., Chen, H., Mao, Y., Chen, S., … & Dai, J. (2020). Mental health problems and social media exposure during COVID-19 outbreak. Plos one, 15(4), e0231924.