Text by Sebastian Duto
Photo by Edward Tjahyadi

  The year 2020 has definitely been the longest year of our lives. The unprecedented transition in the first few months we entered quarantine was full of confusion, panic, and scare. But eventually, months later, we have come to peace with the situation, and try to do the best we can under the circumstances. Having an abundance of time with ourselves, there’s no denying that all of us have once tried to introspect the way we live before the pandemic.

We tried to unravel how we perceive the world and the people in three different scopes: mass, mutual, mind. And what we learned was that even after having limitations in our social lives, we still find ways to persistently seek for others’ validation. By aid of social media and an abundance of time, we come to see the fragility of our insecurity, inclination of awareness of how we are perceived. The toxicity of comparisons will mutate your own judgments about you.

    Our work and every social norm as we know it have been twisted by this pandemic. No more physical meetings have made us lonelier than ever. The essence of social norms like birthdays has been degraded, but we still make do and celebrate even with every hardship. The Internet’s premise of having us more connected will never fulfill our longing to have company in physical presence.

Where days passed indistinguishable from the next, we are left alone with our own thoughts and we dwell hard off the better days. Resilience, empathy and the will for adapting to new sets of things has been human’s best trait in surviving hard times. We as a collective are being tested by the universe on our unity.

  This is Highlights! Magazine covering the issue of introspection under quarantine. Serving this time as a “pit-stop” in our swift yet brief lives.

Text by Tsabita Sekarlintang
Illustration by Elvira Gosal

      Here we are, living under the same constant routine. Nothing much has changed for the last 8 months, only the weather gets colder, or Biden won the election. How do we live to a very minimum source of excitement?

     We are blessed to live as the social media generation. Information about everything is at the end of our fingertips, not to mention this phenomenon has impacted our way of living. When your life seems to get dull, the world never stops evolving to serve you wonders.

     We never thought that we have wasted the times of our lives until quarantine and its abundance of time sends you to reflect on yourself. To realize something that has always been so close, to recognize that you have known nothing about this world.

     At the very beginning, what once was a new decade full of hopes, dreams and sparks have turned into a stopping point, a pit stop. 2020 had humanity shocked. Who would have thought that the excitement could turn into fear, hopes could turn into despair, dreams that turn into failure, and the abundance of opportunity into a threat. Simultaneously happening global phenomenon this pandemic is; paralyzing civilization, demolishing our economy, depriving physical interaction. There is no better way to test our community resilience than this particular pandemic.

     Who would have thought that this unprecedented phenomenon has changed the way we live. It forces behavioural changes in people. Tweaking our routines, turning an expeditious pace into winding confusion, a confinement period resulting in fundamental changes with a stake in our own lives and well-being. This unexpected gap year is an opportunity for us to take a break and perceive our cycle of productivity. Nevertheless, to take a break is a privilege because some of us don’t even get the chance to have one.

     I care therefore I adapt, I change, and I want to make the best out of this unprecedented time. Because the thing about humans; we adapt and overcome (hopefully). Since the truth is, humanity shares the same suffering, and this is a way for us to view this as a stopping point to stand back and observe, to let go, to relax and to contemplate. After all, this is a part of a process that we need to experience and traverse. This too, shall pass.

Text by Sebastian Duto

Cover by Biblioteca Escolar

A wave of something like panic swept the town. There was a demand for drastic measures, the authorities were accused of slackness and people who had houses on the coast spoke of moving there, early in the year though it was.

    Albert Camus once wrote an allegory about World War 2, he wrote in the form of a plague. The horror begins when Dr. Rieux comes across a dead rat, and another, and another… The epidemic then seizes Oran, a fictional prefecture in Algeria. Only after it becomes impossible to ignore, then the authorities applied strict sanitation measures, placing the whole city under quarantine. The people then react to the immediate confinement with intense longing for their absent loved ones.

    Like the people in Oran before the occupation of the plague, we assume that our lives have been granted safety of any danger, and this ineptitude conceived a behavior of a joyless, hatred for others, and a lack sense of fellowship. One character gave suspicion of the reality of the plague, calling in the 1947 of the West, the Plague had vanished. In the time where a quarter of the citizens of Oran is dying, people still believe that the plague won’t get to them. The pestilence does not come in human dimensions, like wars, so people tell themselves it is unreal, that it will vanish just when one wants it to vanish.

    For Camus, being alive is truly an “underlying condition”. To live is to have an emergency and constant awareness of all the things happening around us. In the end, when the plague is successfully contained, Dr. Rieux still believes that the plague will once again come crashing, and send another unprepared city to suffer. Camus holds up human’s absurd vulnerability, that no man can be immune from the plague that is life’s absurdity. When writing “La Peste”, Camus did not consider this to be a warning of the real plague marching into the world. 73 years later, it feels like he did. 

     Sometimes, we took a little bit of our time staring at our reflection in the mirror. We reflect and rethink for everything that we have been missing or done for the past few months. To finally come with an idea that we are only a speck of dust within the universe, we realize how small and meaningless our lives have become to the society. Staying home and quarantine must have been the classic excuses for us to pull ourselves from socializing. We started to feel comfortable with being alone, just us and our comfort zone. Without thinking about anyone else, but ourselves.

     It was nice for a while having a time to really self-reflect, until we realize that we are losing everyone. For we have been focusing on ourselves, we gave zero contribution to the society. We realized that it is not only us that needed help, but everyone around us are struggling as much as we are. At this point, we know that we should go back to square one, and make our own contribution, even the smallest one.

Text by Ayesha Mitza S.

Illustration by Devon Dwiyanto

    We can all admit when we haven’t been doing something that’s “productive”, our reason is often caused by our lack of free time. Entering lockdown, I hear a lot of us talk about how we are going to do so much in our newfound freedom. Like start painting or working out again, or maybe continue the novel you’ve been reading, make new recipes, or just basically start to learn new things you’ve never tried before. Some even join a few webinars and collect online certificates. Sure, some of us did that, but definitely not all.

Text by Nathania Aviandra
Photo by David Leonardo

    We might often find ourselves sinking in our train of thoughts. The deeper we go, the more we discover things and traits about ourselves, and it also tickles me that the fact of how easy and fast people pinpoint other people’s weaknesses. They would easily judge us within seconds and the amount of it outweighs the strengths. The fear of judgment keeps people from avoiding expressing their true selves, self-expressing in clothing is a privilege in other countries for instance, but sometimes, in reality, there is this constant fear that had changed their aesthetic. We tend to hold back from expressing ourselves freely because we are afraid of being judged and feeling not good enough for who we truly are.