Essay Narration: Life under Lockdown
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
Week. Six. Life under lock down. We are going into a global recession. We're in an economic downturn, the one of these now in recession. It's almost like a meteor hit the entire planet, and we have to now deal with the fact that we've been knocked off our access, a strange new reality. Some days I can run around our 60 square meter apartment, achieving new heights of productivity. Other days I find myself lodged on the couch in the policy of social distancing will be needed until at least the end of the year. Everything hinges on a massive research effort to try to develop vaccines. The weight of the headlines, the climbing death counts, the young healthcare workers dying on the front lines. The abysmal weight of it all is paralyzing. The best I can do is distract myself. Today, Ontario's premier called in the military The total number of Corona virus cases in Canada has now surpassed 40,000 with more than 2000 deaths. Sometimes I feel it all too much, and it clouds my thoughts and hurts my heart. Sometimes I can't bear the weight of the foreboding menace of it. The unknowns when Will it hit my family? Will we survive? How will it end? The loneliness is like a deep, aching worsening before finding a bit of relief in distraction. And then the wave hits again. Now, six weeks in, I'm finding a new type of relief. It took a tragedy back in Canada, distant but close to home four days after the deadliest mass shooting Canada has ever seen. Emotions, of course, remain raw in Nova Scotia. For me to realize this really could be it, cliche or not, today is all we have, and I find myself cherishing the small things. My nephew on facetime low rolling belly laughs escaping his chubby cheeks, says, We play a digital version of hide and seek a put one foot in front of the other advice from parents. We'll check in with you in a little while, asked for and received planting vegetables and dark soil lined up like soldiers ready to bask in the warming long spring days. The eyes of the grocery store clerk smiling above her mask, the smell of buds opening on the flowering tree in the backyard, the taste of homemade bagels I am choosing instead of giving into the fear of foreboding loss to cherish. Well, we still have not for its permanence, but for what it is right now. In this moment I've asked myself if this is all I ever accomplished, What then? What would it mean to leave my house today and never come home? Never buy the dream house. Never hold a child and call it mine Never actually achieved my goal weight. Never write that book. I've decided. If God forbid, the future I've always counted on never becomes the present. I will have lived a beautiful whole life. E will have found true love against all odds. I will have created and sculpted a broken masterpiece Out of my days on Earth, I will have said the I love you's Before it was too late. I will have accrued neither status nor wealth, and I will die a rich woman. Take this by no means is giving up, although perhaps in a way it is. It is a giving up of the striving to be someone else and a happy giving in to the life I lead. It is giving up grieving. The goals not reached. It is celebrating small steps and restructuring life around the present. It is redefining success into something closer to rooting into the unwavering foundation of who I am and finding it wanting of nothing.