Happy Early Birthday, Quarantine (?)
When the fireworks were lit up in the first hour of 2020, nobody knew for sure what was to come,
I remember very vividly of the first day of January 2020 — sleeping soundly in a hotel in Semarang, Central Java, before being woken up by the sounds of firework explosion. I was overwhelmed at first, taking a quick glance at my phone screen shortly after, only to see that it was already the 18th minute of 2020. I internally panicked, remembering fully well how I set an alarm earlier that night to wake me up 30 minutes before the awaitened hour. My parents were up, recording the firework display; while I was on the bed — half-concious, regretting my sleeping habits, reflecting on 2019, and looking brightly at 2020. I then fell asleep again, feeling positive of 2020.
Time goes fast, and never before in my life had I dreamed of knowing that people fight over masks and toilet papers. It was weird for me, as several weeks prior to that, people were hugging one another—masks running out of stock wasn’t a problem; heck, I was even on a field trip with more than 40 other students to Lombok, East Nusa Tenggara. It felt like everything was so out of place, and I wasn’t even able to fully understand what was going on.
Just after that, the government announced a 2-week lockdown (which started on around March 16th, 2020), my friends and I joked with one another, saying things like “don’t miss me too much”, or even making plans for what to do once the protocol was over; and that clearly didn’t age well. Everything was chaotic, the country was practically a whole mess — there were ‘quirky’ citizens who refused to follow the lockdown protocols (some of them not even wearing masks for pre-cautions while going out to public places).
I, on the other hand, was struggling with online school. Many unfortunate events have happened to me while adapting to online school—for example, 1) waking up late, only to realise that it was 11am, loosely translating to having missed 3 periods, 2) the very many connection problems, 3) overwhelming stress with the new method of learning, resulting in piles of schoolwork, and also 4) having to develop an uncomfortable strategy in studying in order to ‘keep up’ with the online school pace. No, those weren’t the only things to have happened; online school is one gigantic ball of mess.
Let’s be real, though — 2020 was a very eventful year for so many people, regardless of their age, gender, profession, academic background, race, or nationality. Despite all the hardships that we’ve went through in 2020, we’ve all managed to stay strong up to this date, and that’s something to be proud of. Quarantining has helped me realise so many things I wasn’t able to pick up before; I was able to determine what I wanted, improve and evaluate myself, all while expanding my knowledge on both academic and social matters. 2020 may be full of problems, but every problem has a solution to it; just because you haven’t solved it doesn’t mean that it is impossible. It’s like what people say, “you can’t have a rainbow without a little bit of rain.”
