How Covid changed my life forever
Alright, you probably have tons of articles talking about how covid changes things for them. For me, I am going to focus more as to how it affected my priorities in life and my friendships in general.
Before covid happened, I do what everyone does: going out to bar and hanging out with friends. Then this pandemic happened. Ouch.
I remember the whole world going into panic on the first few weeks. At that point, I start seeing grocery stores running out of toilet paper and hand sanitizers. It was one of the craziest things I ever seen in my life.
Staying at home wasn’t easy for me. Before this, I would go hiking with some of my friends, doing wine tasting and talk about life. Now? The only thing I can do is have virtual happy hours, talking to my friends online and that’s it. All of a sudden I felt isolated from the rest of the world.
I can no longer just head into a restaurant and enjoy a romantic dinner with my wife. The only thing I was able to do is spend time with my wife(which is pretty amazing in its own rights) and playing video games, but it is still pretty different.
I felt lost. But again, it gave me more time to reflect. Before, I used to occupy my calendar 24/7, always finding something to do with my wife or going outside. Now I have time to figure out new recipes to cooks, what I want to learn on my personal time and prioritize the goals that matter to me.
It was also a time where I get to slow down my life and starting to see who my real friends are. Before the pandemic, I had so much to do outside of home and I never really had a chance to properly evaluate my friendships. I started thinking: are these people really my friends? Or are they just there looking for someone to hang out?
Most importantly, will these people still be willing to spend their time to connect with you? Most likely the answer is no for a lot of you. That was the case for me and it made me realize one thing: only focus time on people that matters.
During the pandemic, I rarely recall spending a lengthy conversation with anyone often. I went into an isolation mode mentally and quite frankly, this was one of the most peaceful time for me. I didn’t had to spend a lot of time connecting with my friends and instead focus on how to make my mental being better.
One thing that I did miss a lot was my family. Well to provide a little bit of context, my relationship with my family isn’t all that great. Despite that, it was weird not being able to my dad on a weekly basis for a lunch, or cooking together at his house.
It put a lot of strain on my relationship with him. It was hard for him to not being able to see on a weekly basis and there was a period of time where my relationship with him was cold. There were a lot of drama between my family and my wife when I got married.
Eventually our relationship slowly heals but then covid hits. Ouch.
Family is precious. Through all this isolation that I am experiencing, I realize how much of a blessing it is to have people that care about you around you. When we were kids, we took them for grant because they were always around. Being in my late 20s, I realize that my family is getting older and the people that cares about us might not be around us anymore.
One key point that summarizes what I want to say in this article: treasure the people that cares about you and focus on the things that matter.
Good day.
