Number One: Being at home for a lot of time.
At the start of 2020, I never would have thought that saying I’m an expert in isolation would have been something to brag about, but what do I know? It turns out that in a quarantine, my skills at homeschooling and scheduling are an asset, not just something that I embarrassedly tell my teachers when they ask me where I went to school before. What do I mean by “expert in isolation?” Well, before I moved to North Carolina, I was homeschooled for around 10 years in a rural town in the mountains of Java, an island in Indonesia.
So, for our first column: How did my fellow family members and I not go insane while being together for a long time? Well, it’s up for debate whether any of us were sane to begin with, but part of it was organization. Keeping our house clean helped give everyone peace of mind. There is something very calming about having everything in place. Now, having a completely clean house is typically something that’s out of the question when you’re one teenager in a family of messy people, or maybe you’re the messy person. That’s okay! Limit cleaning up to what you can control. Maybe that’s your room, or your desk, or maybe just your closet, but try to have something that’s under your control be clean and orderly.
Something else that helps combat the stir-craziness is to make a schedule. Schedules aren’t necessarily for everyone, but it makes handling your workload so much easier. Have a sustained pattern for how your days go—i.e, when you have lunch, when you wake up and go to sleep, when you have Math class… etc. I have an in-depth process for how I organize my day, and the main things I focus on are having breaks and having a similar structure each day. The point is, knowing how your day is going to go when you wake up gives you peace of mind. Or at least, it gives me peace of mind.
Another one of the ways that I stay sane is interacting with nature. While that’s pretty hard to do given the stay-at-home order, you can at least change your scenery sometimes. Go outside by sitting on your driveway, by sitting out on your porch, or by going out into the woods and just walking around. Avoid other people, but don’t just stay in your room all day. You’ll start to get irritable to those around you, even if you aren’t trying to be.
I hope everybody reading this is in good health, both mentally and physically. The ECHO wishes everybody a safe and comfortable quarantine!
Photo by Shay Wisdom/The ECHO
This article very well articulates suggestions for surviving quarantine as a student. Well written.