The Isolation Journals Week #3

The Isolation Journals is a weekly post on life during the unofficial lockdown or Restricted Movement Order (RMO). The journal will be updated every Wednesday. This is the journal for Week 3.

By Farhira Farudin

How is everyone holding up lately?

Frankly I find it to be difficult. Everything is different and again, even after one month after the RMO is announced, I still find myself adapting to the new normal. Even if the new normal means I get to stay at home all the time. 

There's just something so displeasing to be forced inside your home when there's a whole world out there waiting for you to venture every corner of it. I resent the idea of doing things from one spot only, the urgency to move around has never hit closer to me than ever. Virtual classrooms have proven to be far from appealing to me, and it has been money consuming too for me to purchase data all the time just so I could see and hear my lecturers clearly. I don't always get things done on time too. There's something intoxicating about working/studying from home that makes you feel like you have all the time in the world to complete your tasks. When the truth is far from simple. You don't have all the time in the world. The time is ticking and moving as per usual, and it waits for nobody. Your assignments starts to pile up, your every day house chores slowly feels like a burden especially there's no one around helpful enough to help you and yet you still think you're at home and you have a lot of free time. You don't. But the illusion of staying at home makes you believe as if you do have a lot of free time to complete your tasks. By the end of the week, you realized you are almost halfway throughout the first term of your semester yet the level of your knowledge has been sub par. That's when it hits you that maybe being too comfortable at home can sometimes bring harm to your lifestyle. I miss the busy days a lot. Staying put in one place only makes me believe that I am free, when I am anything but. I had more freedom when I could actually walk around, meet people and feeling the burden of workload on my shoulders. At least by being busy, I know my life is going somewhere.