I never considered myself a writer, I didn’t even see myself as a ‘person who writes’ for my entire life, until nearly every other thing I had in my life was ripped away from me. During quarantine, in 2020, I was completely and fully isolated from the rest of the world. I had no friends, I could barely go outside, and I was disillusioned with art. All I had left was writing. I don’t think any one in my family noticed how much I wrote for the year I was separated from the world. I blocked out everything, and the few moments I can actually remember still stand out to me. They’re like momentary islands that occasionally spot the murky sea that became my memories of the year. Most of them are the rare few moments when I went outside or saw my friends, only a rare few of them are of me writing.
I spent the first three months of quarantine imagining that I was bathed in purple and blue light. Desperately trying to bring some excitement into my life, and to imagine that my misery could be in the form of a constant light over me. So that someone, anyone, could see it and maybe help it. For someone who had absolutely despised school, I was uncharacteristically heartbroken when it was actually taken from me. Without someone telling me what to do constantly, and the constant validation from good grades, I felt lost. I first started writing essays to keep me feeling ‘productive’ within the emptiness that had become my daily life, but I never finished any of them. I never finished any of my short stories either, but they were the only things that kept me sane. I would write about myself, or people that I wished I was. They would never look or act like me, most of the time they wouldn’t even be good people. They just had to be interesting, someone I could latch onto to give myself something to live for. I barely remember any of the stories I wrote, except for one. I remember that one word for word. It was a fake diary entry, of a girl that was not me, about a dream that I had mere seconds before I wrote down the story. The ‘Diary Girl’s’ dream was about yet another girl who wasn’t her, but also no one other than her. It’s a very short, incomplete, story that was essentially word vomit about how incomplete and disorganized I felt. It was my imaginary directorial debut, and the story itself was less of a ‘story’ and more of a broken screenplay. The ‘Dream Girl’ was looking at herself into a mirror, leaning over a sink, and there was nothing else. It was just her under a spotlight, isolated from the rest of the word, just like I was. The blue light that washed over me was there too, it was always there. Constantly. At a certain point the light, and the sadness that came with it became comforting. “Dream Girl’ stared at herself until the mirror cracked, splintering into a million parts that reflected a million different versions of her. This, as expected, was written at the tipping point of my dissolution with my life, when I finally hit rock bottom at full speed. This was the point that, somehow, threw me out of the blue light. It might’ve also been that this happened near the end of quarantine, and it was the last few moments I had before I was finally allowed out.
This was what characterized the entirety of 2020 to me. The feeling of emptiness and disillusionment with the life I was infected with, made out by the blue light was haunting me. I never had a revolutionary moment that cast away the light, it simply faded away as my life returned to normal. Writing during the quarantine helped me come to terms with the changing world around me. Especially at such a young age, the quarantine was deeply unsettling and uncomfortable for me; I didn’t know what was going on, or why things were happening the way they were. This expressed itself as extreme disillusionment and dissatisfaction with my current life, and writing was one of the only things that kept me sane throughout it. Throughout 2020 writing grew from a simple way to pass the time and feel productive, to something I genuinely loved doing. Ever since then, I have always drifted to writing whenever I feel like I need to take some time for myself. Writing genuinely is one of the best parts of my days, and even now, through the murky waters of my memories the moments in which I’m writing stand out, lit under a spotlight.
