Most days in quarantine can feel like an endless cycle of scrolling through the various social media apps on your phone. For me, during the first few weeks of quarantine at least, this is what most my days seemed like. I was just waiting. Waiting for school to reopen, waiting to see my friends, waiting to go to the movies, waiting to go out to eat. I soon came to realize that quarantine wasn’t just going to magically end in a couple weeks, this realization led to another one: I now had a LOT of time on my hands. I thought to myself I could not spend all my time on my phone, or binge watching every Netflix show I was behind on. 

At first my hobbies were trying to get really good at the various video games I like to play, which now, two months later, I am very good at. I decided I needed to do something else, something a little more creative, and also something that would reduce the amount of time I spend looking at a screen during the day. 

I called my grandma and asked her what she has been doing during quarantine. She told me that she has spent a lot of her time knitting. I looked up a Youtube tutorial for how to knit, the one I watched was made by RJKnits and it is called “How to Knit: Easy for Beginners”. At first, this video aggravated me because of how overly chipper and happy the guy sounded while describing the process of knitting as I sat there alone in my room frustrated trying to figure it out.  

This was especially difficult because I am left handed, and most of the beginner tutorials were for right handed people. But, thankfully, after several hours, I completed my first row of stitching! 

While the process of learning was at first frustrating, I realized this time during quarantine was the perfect time for me to learn something new, and pick up a new hobby that under normal circumstances, I may not have the time for. 

Quarantine can seem boring, and like a series of repetitive days. But, we should try to take advantage of this time and pick up skills we never thought we would be able to do. Besides, what else do you have to do?