A Year of Fear Upends the Life of an Artist

The Covid-19 pandemic has completely changed the way that college students learn and attend classes in the past year.

Many students struggle with mental health and the adjustment to online learning; especially for those in majors and programs that normally have lab and studio classes, where work is completed in the classroom and learned hands-on.

Haley Wichman sat down with Jo Willis, a sophomore at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, to talk about about how the pandemic has affected her life and studies.

Q-Haley Wichman: What has been the hardest part about living through the pandemic?

A-Jo Willis: I think with school and work I’ve had a hard time finding a balance because I’m in my apartment all the time and in the same place, and I do school from my room sometimes. It’s just hard to separate school and then just living.

When I go to school in person there’s a different boundary in my brain, there’s school and then there’s after school, and now having work leak into all of my time has made it hard for me to find a balance with my mental heath, that along with being stuck inside.

Q: What has been difficult about the pandemic socially?

A: When I was in person each class would develop a friendly environment, we would give each other critiques and just talk about work while we were making it.

That’s kind of just lost now because having a conversation is harder over Google Meet and we’re not working in the same space. So I do miss that and seeing what other people are working on.

Q: What are you afraid of?

In relation to Covid, I’m less scared of myself getting sick than getting the people I love sick. Especially when I lived at home I lived with my grandma, and she’s turning 84 this year and she has asthma and other health conditions. I was just so afraid to go out at all because I didn’t want to bring anything back to her. And my mom also has health conditions that would make Covid hard for her. So living at home, which I did for a few months this summer, I was afraid of getting my family sick. And living in an apartment now I’m afraid of getting my roommates sick or getting my girlfriend sick.

Q: What about your more general fears?

A: I’m afraid of being unhappy and I’m afraid of making art that doesn’t matter.

Q: Do you think that the pandemic has made those other fears worse? From the isolation and the loss of your school community?

A: I think definitely, without the community I get in my head a lot more and I don’t have that external feedback to keep me grounded.”

And it’s definitely affected my mental health because I’m like alone or with the same few people most of the time, again with the loss of community it’s harder to stay grounded and self regulate. And to see the light at the end of all of this.

Q: What have you learned about your life this past year?

I think I’ve had a lot of growth, I feel like an entirely different person than at the beginning of the pandemic. I have more confidence in myself in some ways and less confidence in others.

Q: What have you learned about the people around you?

A: I think what I’ve learned about others, there’s a lot of people that I was close with last year that I’m not really close with anymore. But I feel like the people that I have chosen to be with I’ve gotten really close with and I’ve learned a lot about them, just because we’re together all the time.

Q: In that way do you think the pandemic has helped your relationships become deeper? Or overall do you think it has been detrimental to your relationships?

A: I think it has helped the relationships that I have maintained but really hurt the ones that I have kind of lost contact with because we are going to have to pick up and start again in a lot of cases.

Q: How do you think your life, or the lives of your friends and family, will change once the worst of it is over?

A: Thinking of my family specifically, I think that they hold a lot of fear for the same reasons that I mentioned before, like bringing sickness back to my grandma. And I think that for my family that fear will stick around for a while. And I think people will have a hard time getting back into the swing of things like how they are normally and being social again.

Q: What about the effect on your own life?

A: So much has happened and I think I’m going to carry that with me for a long time, I think the way that I react to things is a lot different now, I think the way that I make friends is different.