After spending so many months at home during the lockdown in 2024, I was never happier about resuming school, and I didn't exactly like school. The whole time in isolation from what I knew as the world before made me realise what I may have undervalued all along. Meanwhile, I wasn't seeing the bigger picture yet.
During the lockdown, everyone had to escape somehow, and many of us used our digital devices for that. I spent a lot of my time on screens. YouTube became a companion. Chess has become a lifestyle. I played my acoustic guitar every time and made recordings every night. I watched films more than ever before. Call of Duty Mobile provided me with a virtual world to get lost in - shooting.
Thankfully, we had a lot of family members with us during those months, so I did have people to chat and do things with.
Yet it was entirely different. I mean, I did like that I wasn't going to work or school at first, but it was then that I understood a little better that the word "alone" could be used for both loneliness and solitude, both at different ends of a spectrum, and I was living in the former.
It was during this time that I started to workout again. The last time was in 2017, but it began to feel absolutely necessary to do it to maintain mental stability. And that's how I discovered how liberating exercise can be, especially with the right diet and adequate rest.
It was that time during the lockdown that I figured out just how life could be for me when I am "not necessarily attending school" anymore after graduation from the university. And, also, a sense of what I would really like to do—having some kind of remote work that I'd be passionate about.
The pandemic wasn't as severe for us where I'm from, Nigeria—Lagos, at least—and so things quickly normalised after some months after the lockdown in 2021. For me, however, I started to lose my zeal for things like school. I was in my fourth year then, out of five, studying engineering.
I managed to get good grades until I finally graduated, but I had my eyes on something different. I realised that I needed to find something to become passionate about, develop with it, and then find ways to add value, and academics alone wasn't going to cut it.
And so, I started to explore anything and everything that piqued my interest. I allowed my curiosity to drive me where and even carry me where I no not know—carefully, though.
In 2021, I took my industrial training at an automation academy seriously, gained a lot of knowledge, and was even impressed by my boss and my colleagues. And then I made workouts become part of my lifestyle.
Hive came along the line in 2022, and that's how things started to level up for me. "My thing" turned out to be harnessing what computers can do. Writing, like now, has now become an everyday lifestyle. And now, I'm shifting into topics that I find fascinating and exploring them. The next phase will be full-time content creation.
Before the pandemic, I wasn't as goal-driven as I am now. I may not have found the places I belong now, the people I have come to know, and be chasing what I'm passionate about so soon, and probably just been following the default trajectory that, I don't know...
Some things happen for a reason, and they may shift our balance, but like the saying, "the cure is in the disease"—which I respectfully do not directly relate to the pandemic—some challenges contain the seeds of our greatest transformations.
Something I miss from pre-pandemic, although things are pretty much normal now, is the better economy we had compared with how it is now. Nevertheless, we'll forget ahead resiliently, as always.
