It’s crazy to think that we were living in a pandemic this time five years ago. It was five years ago that COVID literally shut the entire world down.
It will truly be one of those things that when we are asked “do you remember where you were when [insert major event] happened” and we can honestly vividly remember what was happening that moment.
For me, I was in Florida visiting a college friend, nervous that the pandemic was getting worse to the point that my flight back home was going to be cancelled. Many of us thought we would be back at work in two weeks, getting a nice needed break from life before we got back to the swing of things. Thankfully, I was able to make it back to New York before everything started to shut down, and—needless to say— did not realize that we would be home for the next 5+ months. Of course in that time, many of us went to the internet for entertainment, keeping us busy in a time that was uncertain, uneasy, and really tragic for many of us.
I was one of those people whose life was chronically online, and every interest and hobby I had involved being a part of some online community. I met a ton of people online during this time, which was something that I truly needed in such a transitional part of my life. I was in my mid 20’s still trying to find my identity after it was tied to being a student after so long. It wasn’t long that I started to surround myself with people who lived all over the world, sharing the same interests as me and connecting through this hobby of ours.
Of course, I didn’t think that this hobby of mine would just be another phase of my life. Something tells me that for many of these people, they didn’t think this was going to be theirs either.
Hi, my name is Liz, and I am no longer a K-pop collector, a penpal writer, or chronically online anymore.
Many of my readers know that K-pop was something that really defined me at one point in my life. I went through all of the stages of being a K-pop Stan, and while I cringe looking back at how serious I took it, it was a building block in figuring out my true identity. I sometimes blame my “falling out” on K-pop on the negative cognition I have with it: it’s something that associates itself of a time that was great but so damaging to my mental health. I sometimes blame it on the fact that the groups that are popular now are no longer the groups I listen to; most of which have either disbanded or now on hiatus to make room for newer (and younger) groups. Like, I’m sorry – how is there a new girl group with a maknae that was born in 2010?! Sure, that girl is 15 years old but to think that 2010 was 15 years ago is insane to me.
Anyway—
I thought that it was a mixture of those two things: maybe I just don’t connect with it in the way that I did before because it represented such a different time in my life. But, then it clicked: where in the world did everyone that was once in this community go as well?
I could name a handful of people that I have not heard from since the world began to slowly come out of the pandemic. Even in 2022 (which for me was my true last year of K-pop collecting) I started to not see the same people in the community that was once there during the height of the pandemic. It made me wonder a lot of things: how could we leave (or sell) something we worked so hard (and spent so much) in completing, and why was it so easy for us to just stop?
I think K-pop collecting, and even penpal writing (in my brain, they are one in the same because they stemmed from the same online community) was just a filler in a lot of people’s lives. In a world where we were so uncertain if we were ever going to see a life where wearing masks would not be required anymore or if we would ever return to our classrooms or jobs and interact with people in person again, I think we all needed some way to nurture the human qualities in us.
We need to socialize, we need to work on something or learn something new or do something in a way that makes us feel good. I mean, how many of the people in your life currently do something that they said they picked up during the pandemic? There are some out there still doing what their pandemic selves did, but for most it seems like the hobbies and interests we invested in was just temporary, or at least until the world opened back up and we were able to spend our money on experiences, not materialistic things.
Personally for me, I like to spend my time and energy on creating tangible memories; ones that don’t solely develop and live online anymore. My life (and identity) were once tied to solely being on the internet, realizing that the people I thought I would click with forever due to our common interests were also just a product of their social media persona. Yes, I had one as well. For me, I just realized that the things I valued weren’t on the internet anymore, and once everything began to open up, I started to spend more time outside. I went to more concerts, more parties, more social gatherings, and more vacations since I stopped putting my energy in things that I didn’t have much to show for. Having an aesthetic looking Instagram page was also becoming extremely outdated and it screamed “produced by the pandemic”. In a nutshell, I started to stray away from both communities until I completely let go of them both.
It took me some time to accept the fact that I grew out of this phase. I had thought that this was my end all be all, only because it was the first time in my life that I had a group of online friends with the same exact interests as me. By all means, I am not shitting on people that still have these close connections with their online friends in their designated communities, I’m just saying that with my observations and time to reflect on that time, I realized that a lot of people used their pandemic hobbies as an outlet. It was an outlet to pass all the time we didn’t have before, the uncertainty of when the world would go back to normal (which, in my opinion has never been the same since, but that’s a different post for a different day) and most importantly; it was an outlet to keep us connected to people when we couldn’t physically see them or hang out with them.
Personally, I will always remember this time in life as the stepping stone in the person I am now. I think I needed those experiences to understand what I truly wanted out of life, and those that I associate myself with. I’ve also learned to not always deem the person I once was as “unhappy” or “unwell” by any means. I was happy, and it was fulfilling to the person that was living through a pandemic. Like, if something that you once loved got you through something, it got you through something and you shouldn’t feel ashamed in that if this is something you relate to.
In the meantime, I would love to hear about the hobbies that you guys picked up during the pandemic! What were they? How did you discover them? Are they still an important part of your life? If not, when did you completely let the hobby go? And most importantly: how did that hobby shape you as a person?
Letters From Liz. 