Spending the June holidays with fulfillment

Written as a Media Volunteer at Heartware Network. Also published on the Heartware Network blog.

The June holidays are coined by most youths as their unofficial “summer” vacation. The holidays would see most of them spend their time basking in the sun with their loved ones while breathing in the fresh air.

However, the idea of the “perfect summer vacation” was crushed when the Covid-19 pandemic arrived in Singapore and safe management measures were put into place. This resulted in youths having to spend their June holidays alone or with their family members cooped up in their homes.

Unfazed by such a disruption to their well-deserved break from school, three youth volunteers decided to spend their time exploring their hobbies from the comfort of their home. We spoke to 18-year-old Tan Chin Hsien, 18-year-old Neha Biju Thantry, and 17-year-old Leah Randhawa, to find out more about how they spent their June holidays fruitfully.

Honing his craft in videography

Heartware Network media volunteer Tan Chin Hsien decided to take a break for his own mental health and continue with his passion project of running his own YouTube channel.

Chin Hsien’s YouTube channel, which is related to video games and video essays, is run by himself. His first video on the channel is a gaming video he made playing Risk of Rain, and that is also his most favourite video.

His personal process of creating a video would be coming up with a video idea, then planning the content according to the subtopics that he wants to cover. He writes the points for those topics and writes the final script before recording b-rolls and footage for the video.

According to Chin Hsien, he refers to his hobby as a “learning experience” and he realised how “difficult” it is to run a YouTube channel.“As a consumer, you watch other people’s YouTube channel, let’s say (a) ten or fifteen-minute video, you don’t really pay much attention to how much effort, time and care goes into editing, writing a script, filming it and everything,” Chin Hsien said.

“Doing this by myself…made me appreciate content creation in a certain way,” the Ngee Ann Polytechnic Film, Sound and Video student said. “For many people, they usually only want to do content creation for fame or so they can hope to one day, be famous (and) have a million subscribers, but they do not actually realise how much effort and care goes into the craft.”

He emphasises the importance of the “quality of content” that one has on their YouTube channel, rather than the number of subscribers one has.

Besides posting videos on his YouTube channel, the regular Heartware media volunteer also writes articles for Heartware Network’s blog. Chin Hsien is currently working on an article about anxiety attacks and mental health. He chose to write about mental health after “facing a huge loss” when his close friend committed suicide after fighting a long and hard battle against severe depression.

According to him, writing the article helped him “gain a new introspection into mental health.”

“It really helped me, just take a step back and reflect a bit as well as finding out ways on how to help other people with similar conditions.” Chin Hsien said.

Chin Hsien has seen himself honing his craft in videography to take a break for the sake of his mental health.

Graphic by Kisha San Juan.

When asked if he had advice for students who are struggling to find time to de-stress moving forward after the holidays, he shared, “Take one day completely off just for yourself to be able to do what you want really helps in recharging the motivation. Otherwise, you are going to get burnt out really, really.”

Reading amidst the mad rush for deadlines

18-year-old Neha Biju Thantry loves reading books on her tablet.

Photo credit: Neha Biju Thantry

Initially, 18-year-old A-Level student Neha Biju Thantry was “super stressed about the holidays” due to her upcoming deadlines for her coursework for one of her subjects, Theatre Studies.

However, Neha managed to finish a book called “Notes On Grief” by one of her favourite authors, Chimamanda Adichie. Notes on Grief is a collection of essays about the author’s experience with grief after she lost her father.

According to Neha, she liked that the book was an “honest retelling” of the different stages of grief the author had gone through without “sugarcoating her experience” to be perceived as too positive.

“My favourite thing about the book was that it highlighted the different ways that people use language to cope with loss, or comfort others, and how a lot of us are not equipped with the vocabulary to say the “right” things in these situations,” she recalled.

She started reading a few others, but due to her busy schedule she did not have time to finish the books. According to her, the books are in her “currently reading” at the moment.

According to Neha, she managed to “take some joy in the smaller things” during the June holidays despite trying to catch up with her work for A-Levels.

When asked if she has any advice for students who are struggling to find time to de-stress, she said, “What really matters is to just have small pockets of time in between whatever you’re doing, right wherever you feel like your brain is going to explode from doing too much work… and do something entirely different to refresh you a lot.”

A new perspective to playing sports

Heartware volunteer Leah Randhawa likes to play tennis during her free time.

Photo credit: Leah Randhawa

If Leah Randhawa were to describe her holidays in one word, it would be “interesting”. According to Leah, this holiday was her “first holiday where she had to do a lot of work consistently” as she was in her IB diploma.

Stepping into the June holidays, Leah Randhawa was “in chaos” as she struggled with home-based learning. Leah mentioned that she struggled with it because she had many projects assigned to her, and that she struggled to manage her time. However, she has taken the time to rest and recuperate by prioritising her well-being.

The 17-year-old Heartware volunteer has taken the time to go back into sports, including cycling with her friends and playing tennis which she was into before the COVID-19 restrictions kicked in.

Leah mentioned that playing tennis during the COVID-19 restrictions in the June holidays has presented its own challenges. She could only play tennis with her coach and her family, rather than play tennis with her friends before the pandemic.

“I play at this sports club, so I can only play with people who go to the same sports club as me, so that made me miss playing tennis with my friends whom I used to invite to the sports club but now I cannot,” Leah said. “It made me really appreciate being able to play sports as a way to socialise in a new way.”

Furthermore, the June holidays were met with many rainy days, so Leah could not play tennis “every single week”. However, she took some time during the June holidays to refine her skills.

“I made sure that I am good enough to play with people who already have good tennis skills like my parents,” she said.

With the COVID-19 restrictions, she also took the time off to go cycling and have picnics with her friends. According to her, cycling with her friends was a tradition during the long weekend holidays that they “continued during the June holidays”.

Leah also mentioned that sports was “lacking in her own life before the holidays” so she decided to take on “extra hours of tennis and cycling with her friends.

When asked for her advice on how to de-stress, she said, “When we figure out and recognise that, then we can progress and we can really develop and find ourselves.”