Maybe the quarantine carried a silver lining. Solitude, after all, forces you to listen to yourself. When the solitude is medically prescribed, you can’t run from it—quite literally.
Most people never experience this firsthand. Tatiana Suarez did. Doctors employed radioactive iodine to treat her cancer, and that in turn required isolation. So she retreated to her bedroom, covered all four walls in plastic sheeting and proceeded to contemplate the loss of her lifelong dream. She was 21 years old at the time.
“I couldn’t be around people at all,” she recalls. “I had to stay there for like a week.