Self-Isolation Diaries

By Anastasiya, Newsteam Contributor

Nearly 80 years ago a girl and her family lived in isolation in an attic due to unexpected political conditions. This girl is Anne Frank, she kept a diary of her feelings and daily blessing and fears. She lived many years ago without the entertainment of smartphones, television, youtube, zoom calls, yet today we look at her experience with fascination and incredible interest.

While we are not used to self-isolation and staying at home, and while our experience today is in many ways different, Anne Frank’s Diary is still a source of knowledge for how to handle this quarantine. Anne lived by a strict schedule waking up, eating, showering, and even speaking at specific times of the day. However, she took advantage of daily marvels and was still able to be a teenage girl. She learned that even when there is no school and she can’t spend time with others, every minute of the day counts. However, sticking to the routine wasn’t the key to staying sane in the attic, daily exercise routine, and reading sessions, humor, and self-made presents were the family’s landline to the real world, a way to feel connected to normalcy in the times of turbulence.

Anne’s dream was to become a writer or a journalist, and while she didn’t live to see it her conversations with her diary allow us to see today what life was like. The fact that over 30 million copies of this book were sold, shows the value of our daily life. Everyone experiences quarantine differently, there is no right way to do it. There is no correct routine or plan on how to live in these unusual conditions. Thousands of people around the world are proving this now. Just like Anne Frank, people around the globe are taking it upon themselves to create art in the form of short stories, poems, paintings, and other artwork to capture this moment in history. Imagine, in 5 years from now, every history textbook will end with the COVID-19 pandemic. What will the students see? They will see the harsh facts, statistics, government policies. However, what they should see and read is something like Anne Frank’s diary. Something tells the human side of things that can be passed onto the next generation to learn, just like we learn from Anne Frank.

The next time you are binge-watching Netflix series or scrolling through social media, take that boredom and channel it into something that can make history. Draw your corona house using this template and share it with the world like other artists. If you’re an artist with colored pencils and paintbrushes, you can write a poem or even a short story for your kids or grandkids. To spark the inspiration of your own self-isolation diaries at a look at the artwork collection by New York Times.