#covid19 #employment

I am so sick and tired of writing about COVID-19 but yet here I am again with another blog post regarding the ongoing global health pandemic because its all anyone seems to talk about or focus on.

I have stopped watching the news because I’m tired of hearing all the negativity about the number of deaths in this country and that country and this province, I’m sorry but you cannot absorb that much negative information and then be told to be positive, it just isn’t possible. In the last few days if I’m being completely honestly my mind felt cloudy, I had difficulty sleeping and I was also having a hard time focusing and concentrating. I felt hopeless that we might be stuck in this situation for a very long time with no end in sight. I, like many people out there right now became very short-sighted because I was reacting to the moment where Doug Ford announced that the government doesn’t plan on opening things up until the May long-weekend. And I just kept ruminating about how I could have been in a plane on my way to Portugal and Spain right now, or how if none of this happened I could have been able to see Hamilton live in theatre, something I’ve been dreaming of seeing for 3 years now.

But honestly this whole crisis has taught me that you can’t plan everything and that sometimes it is okay if everything doesn’t go as planned, you need to be able to adapt to things that you cannot control and only focus on the things that you can control. It was very hard for me to focus on the positive for the last few days because this time has been mentally draining for me as a person who lives in a conflict-ridden environment where verbal arguments erupt multiple times throughout the day and shake my nervous system to its core, trying to navigate around that has been a challenge for me but meditating everyday in the morning has been slowly helping me find my calm, though sometimes I still get angry, frustrated and irritated with everything that is going on around me. But let me tell you this, do not try to suppress your negative emotions right now, just let them be, don’t let anyone, not even yourself invalidate those feelings that you are having right now. Your feelings are valid right now, even if you find yourself getting upset about “silly little things”, they are not silly nor little, they were important to you so you should allow yourself to be upset by them if you want to be. You are allowed to feel anyway that you want right now or cope anyway that you want to, to try to get through each day of this lockdown.

Although everything may seem cloudy right now, I am starting to see peaks of sunshine coming through. I had an interview with this research and consulting company and after a few weeks of waiting for them to get back to me after they determined if they have the capacity to be able to hire someone during this time. They offered me a position at the company. I am beyond shocked that I did the seemingly impossible and secured employment during a time when everyone assumed no one would get a job. I also am working on a Data Quality internship with Humanitarian OpenStreetMap at the moment (until May 22nd) where I am volunteering to improve the quality of data something that is very crucial at this time. I also have been attending Zoom webinars some of them suggested to me by OCIC an organization that I am currently aligned with as youth advocate in the Youth Policy-Makers Hub. Though I would like to note that sometimes webinars can be tiring especially because you are staring at a screen for hours and apparently there’s something called ‘Zoom fatigue’, where you get tired of being in Zoom meetings too much throughout the week (makes sense).

So even though things may seem bleak right now, don’t give up. Things are going to get better, just practice patience and send out positive vibes and everything will be okay. I hope that this article gave you some hope and inspiration for the future.