Last night I found a stack of colored paper. They were 12″x12″ and dusty from having sat on my shelf for the past three years. I don’t remember why I got them, but I’ve always remembered them being there.
I took them from the shelf and I dropped them on my desk, their purpose still uncertain, and I didn’t expect myself to do anything.
I then proceeded to spend a while doing homework, doing laundry, and preparing dinner. In this time I had forgotten about the stack of papers and allowed myself to get lost in the routine that I had mindlessly adopted over the past month.
When I came back to my desk while going through the motions of cleaning my room which I now do routinely as well, the stack of papers had a new appeal to them. It posed itself as an opportunity to escape my regimen. So I sat down and I flipped through the seven different colors that repeated themselves tirelessly and considered what I could feasibly do.
I never considered myself to be particularly talented or artistic in any way, art classes have always marked themselves as the low points in my grade book. But I was suddenly inspired to do something with them. I knew I couldn’t draw so I eliminated that, my painting skills were on par with my drawing, but folding paper, I was a beast at folding paper.
Photo: Museum of fine arts, St. Petersburg
Now I had never really attempted Origami, but I approached it rather confidently because of my unexpected prowess in the field of paper airplane design. So I went online, and I decided to make a crane.
When I finally completed my first crane about 15 minutes later, it looked decent, and that presented itself as an incredible surprise.
But I had done it, I’d done something that wasn’t typical of me during this drawn-out period of self-isolation, and it was invigorating. I had suddenly found a simultaneous outlet and power I had over the nationwide restrictions.
I was restrained to my home, I had little power in that regard. But nothing could stop me from making those little paper cranes. In the last 12 hours, I have made an embarrassing number of paper cranes but I don’t see an end in sight.
Throughout my athletic career, I’ve struggled with comparing myself to others. Not only has it affected my performance in sports, but it has affected many other aspects of my life. From not raising my hand in class to ask for help because I’m scared people will think I’m dumb or make fun of me, to quitting a swim team because I thought my teammates judged me and thought of me differently because I was the slowest on the team. But in reality, there were at least ten other of my classmates who were just as confused as I was, and the good people on that swim team liked me because I tried and was kind, and the people who treated me differently because I was the slowest weren’t worth my time anyway.
But still, my fear of being judged has had me in chains for years and I still fight it every day.
Yes, I have been viewed differently by people when my athletic abilities were less than theirs, but I’ve come to the realization that the true athletes are ones who accept and help others succeed.
Dear anyone who needs to hear it: We all start somewhere. We all have our insecurities. Not everyone has the same strengths as others. Comparing yourself to others will only bring you down. The most important thing is to focus on your journey.
Whether you run a 15 minute mile or a 5 minute mile. Whether you can bench 40 pounds or 400 pounds. Whether you swim a 1:40 for a hundred or a :40 for a hundred. The point is you are trying, and that’s what matters.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am not a pro athlete and I am not saying I am in any way, but I have recognized one of the main things that holds me back, and I don’t think I am the only one.
Please know that where ever you are in your athletic journey, don’t look at what others have accomplished, look at the improvement you’ve made because that’s what matters.
I don’t care how talented an athlete may be. If they judge or make someone feel bad because of their abilities, all of my previous respect would be gone. Sportsmanship is building one another up, not tearing each other down. A team is a supportive group of people, not enemies. Athletics is a field meant to empower, inspire, and be available to all people, not just the pros.
If you share this same anxiety as I do, please know that it is your journey that matters and the people worthwhile will support you no matter your skill and ability.
“Those who matter don’t mind, and those who mind don’t matter”- Doctor Seuss
It was flying through the air at full force, I think because something was chasing it. It hit the window with a loud bang and fell to the ground below with a much softer sound, feathers swirling all the way down. It left behind a perfect imprint of wings fully splayed as they smacked into the inch-thick glass above my kitchen sink.
So Dad picked up its body and threw it onto the roof for the hawk on the telephone wire to see. If a dove had to die, he said, it might as well provide for something else.
The hawk seemed young to me when it came some minutes later and carried the other bird away. I looked up and tried to see where spring had gone.
It’s hard for me to tell days from other days when the sky is like this, the color of a dead dove and completely still. I can’t remember how many weeks it’s been and today I wrote that it was May.
I looked at the calendar to see that it was the 19th and finally I realized we are in April. An entire month has gone by and to me it’s felt like one very long day.
Everything goes back to normal here, at least it looks like it.
People are out on the street again, some kids are playing around, some people are running with earphones in, some are waiting at bus station, some are riding bicycles, some are delivering food or other packages……
But every single of them is wearing a mask, even including the baby in the stroller. And they don’t interact with each other but keep distance.
Cars were driven on streets again, public transportations were back as well. Restaurants, supermarkets, malls were reopened. Schools are planning to reopen soon. Even domestic travel has been promoted now.
But no matter what place it is opened, there will be a gigantic obvious sign hanging on the door says “STERILIZED TODAY”, and there will also have a sign right next to it that says “please wait here for the health check.”
PC: timgsa.baidu.com
Disease Prevention Center developed the “Health QR code” to represent the users’ health status at the beginning of February. By now, literally everyone has their own code in their mobile phone, at least in the city where I’m living.
The code has three different colors: green, yellow, and red. Every single place requests to have a GREEN code for entering or leaving. The RED code holder is requested for self-imposed quarantine at home or mass quarantine for 14 days in a row, and shall be eligible to have a GREEN code when he/she has reported himself/herself in normal condition for the past 14 days.
The first free morning after I got out of mass quarantine, my health code didn’t turn into green from red. I had difficulty returning home, the security guard wouldn’t let me enter the community where I live after knowing that I didn’t have the correct color code.
I thought I don’t need to take my temperature twice a day after quarantine, but it turned out that my temperature is taken about ten times a day now.
Wherever I enter, there will always be someone stop me to take my temperature first and then ask to check my health code.
PC: timgsa.baidu.com
One thing really baffled me: I don’t get it why some people slightly backed off and kept distance from me after they heard I am just released from quarantine. Although I also told them that took two testings, and both of them were negative.
I wrote a blog post about racism after virus two months ago, and now I felt a bit of discrimination in my own country. I think it originated from fear, and I don’t know what I can do about it.
As I walked down the hill, rounding the bend just before reaching the parking lot, a thought ran through my mind, but in an instant, I had expelled it. I had thought to myself, “what if this is the last time I set foot on this campus as a student?” But with stormy weather approaching and a sour mood pervasive through the student body, I didn’t allow myself a moment to linger on the idea, and left swiftly, my stereo silent, with only the mechanic hum of my engine to fill my thoughts. Why was I in such a hurry to leave?
I keep playing that moment back in my head. I didn’t take a moment to say goodbye to anybody, I knew I wasn’t going to see them for at least a month, even a brief farewell would be better than nothing. After all, these are the people I have cultivated strong relationships with the past seven years. But I don’t think I was ready.
Now that the remaining strands of my senior year are confined to a desk and I have much of the day to sit on my bed and think, I try to occupy myself with plans of the future. I committed to my college a month earlier, I’m already searching for roommates, trying to get my ideal housing. But I’m still trapped in that moment.
That one singular instance, an otherwise insignificant instant in time amounting to no more than a single shutter of a hummingbird’s wings, and I’m frozen in it. I stand there, Thermoflask in one hand, lunch bag in the other, backpack on, rounding the corner, staring directly at my car as if that would get me there faster. Why was I in such a hurry to leave?
I’ve never been in such a hurry to leave.
Maybe I knew this would be my last time seeing all my friends together again, and I was only trying to save myself, escaping the flood of memories that was rushing down the hill after me.
OVS Journalism Blog 
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