Covid19. Thanks for starting my better years.

I understand that COVID19 had such a negative impact on many people's lives. Many people have lost their loved ones, others have lost their jobs, many people's mental and physical health were and still are affected by all of this craziness. Honestly, Covid19 has affected all of us in many different ways.

To preface this, two years before the Covid outbreak, my sister became very ill and passed away a year later. As you can imagine, losing her affected my family and me very heavily. I stopped studying, I lost my job, I was at an all-time low. I realized what it really meant to be "sad" and "heartbroken". I lost all of my motivation to do anything and to be anything.

After months of dwelling on the memories that I had of my sister, the months of drinking, and making all the wrong decisions, I decided to go on a "tourist day". This was a few months before Covid broke out and changed our lives. I walked around my city, I watched people interact with each other, captured a few moments on my camera, and without meaning to while watching a pigeon pick up a stick, I had a great moment of appreciation for being alive.

I felt like I woke up. Or I guess that I realized that I am still alive. I realized that this is not what she would have wanted for me, she would be disappointed that I was not doing anything for myself and I was making the rest of our family worry.

So that same night, I started thinking about what I really want out of life and what I should do about it. I thought for days, maybe weeks of looking for jobs online and looking through different types of things that I could study until I figured it out.

A month later, I started a new job and a new course. And a month after that the COVID19 outbreak started.

A lot of people that I know were affected, I watched some businesses change their hours but luckily, my course was online as I have never been one to sit in a classroom and listen to somebody talk, and the job that I managed to get was in the health industry so, my plans weren't affected by Covid. At this time, I also decided to start seeing a personal trainer and working out.

I started feeling like myself again. I do still think about my sister every day, maybe multiple times a day and the pain doesn't really go away. I guess instead of feeling like myself 'again', it's really more of a new self. One that unfortunately has more sad thoughts than the previous one but one with more motivations and goals in life.

From 2020, when as far as I can remember we really felt the impact of Covid until now, I am still on this path. Except now, I am just over halfway into reaching the first milestone which is to finish my course. I am still actively training and I feel way better about myself. I have felt so good and built such a good mentor-mentee relationship with my personal trainer that I am now also studying how to be a personal trainer on a part-time basis. I have been saving money from the job that I started in 2020 and have started investing as well!

So, thank you Covid19! For despite taking away my social life, and putting fear in me whenever someone stands too close to me as well as going through the pain of having the have a test every 3 days just so I can go to work, you have actually started the better years of my life!