This is Not Normal
How do people cope? My family copes by staying busy. During the Covid-19 Pandemic my household shifted quickly from a house of two to a house of six. As the world around us changed, our lives inside my home have been cyclical. We stay busy. We started our isolation with my father ending his travels for work and my sisters and I coming home from our respective lives. We ended with family friends dying and my father testing positive for the Covid-19 antibodies. We have been staying busy to protect ourselves from the world around us and try to maintain normalcy, but this is not normal. We have been staying busy to not feel the gravity of what is happening. When my father was ill, we continued to stay busy. He could not get a test therefore as far as we knew, everything was normal. Our house has become an often-cleaned bubble where we can attempt to continue our lives. But this is not normal, nor can staying in our house shelter us from this reality. What staying in our house can do is physically keep us safe, but emotionally we need to stay busy to distract from what we know is reality.