“The isolation just made me feel horrible, lonely, sad and honestly, I probably didn’t cope with it very much.”

Zoe Garnett, 20, is a third-year Dance major at UW-Milwaukee. During the pandemic, Garnett lived in the university residence halls and would occasionally commute back to her home in Appleton, Wis. Before the pandemic, Garnett was interested in dance and activism separately. During the pandemic, she began to combine the two and she now works as a dance instructor at the Milwaukee Youth Department of Corrections, where she teaches incarcerated children as young as 11.

Tommy Mulkerrins: What was your social situation like before COVID? Did you have friends on campus?

Zoe Garnett: I did have friends on campus before COVID, but I would say when COVID hit it made me feel a lot more isolated and I didn’t really communicate with my friends as much.

Q: What was it like trying to hangout with your friends during covid?

A: It was really difficult because I was torn. I wanted to but I was also afraid of getting covid and spreading it. So it was difficult because I wanted to but I wanted to be safe as well.

Q: Did you have friends who were not as heavy on following COVID restrictions compared to others? How did you walk that line?

A: Yeah I definitely knew people that were clearly very careful and I definitely knew people who were not as careful and I mostly just didn’t see the people who weren’t careful about covid and then the one time I did I ended up getting COVID so after that I did not (keep hanging out with friends who were not careful).

Q: What was it like getting COVID?

A: It was really scary and really hard because it happened during the semester and really threw me off. I ended up actually having to drop out of school for the semester because I got really really sick and was hospitalized afterwards. So that put a lot of stress and strain on me and I was also trying to recover physically as well.

Q: Was it hard to find things to do on campus once COVID hit?

A: I basically felt like there was nothing going on and if you wanted to do something it had to be virtual and I have social anxiety so virtual stuff is not as nice for me.

Q: Did you feel like virtual events met your social needs?

A: Yeah definitely not. I am a social person and being alone is really hard. During covid I felt disconnected from people and the world.

Q: What were you doing during your day to day routine?

A: I was doing classes, which were not fun, they were horrible and partially virtual… I basically lost all of my social life outside of school, I wasn’t seeing my friends on campus, there weren’t any events, and I felt very isolated.

Q: Did you try to build friends into your routine or did COVID make it hard to do anything  but seperate?

A: Quarantine definitely made me separate from my friends and I think most everyone that I know had a lot of issues becoming distant from their friends during COVID.

Q: Have you guys reconnected?

A: Some yes and some no, but not like before.

Q: How did you cope with feeling alone? Or did you cope?

A: It was definitely a lot and I was going through some mental health issues already so the isolation just made me feel horrible, lonely, sad and honestly, I probably didn’t cope with it very much.