Life During The Lockdown

18 Feb Life During The Lockdown

I was very excited for the lock down in the beginning. I was okay with staying in for two weeks or even until the end of my sophomore year, school was draining that year.  What I didn’t know and wasn’t expecting to say inside for so long. Not only that but how my life would change over the lockdown. 

 You see, I’m an extrovert and I basically need people to talk to. I would try to make the human interaction I was missing  by talking  with my cousins and people I was close to on the phone every day to make it feel like I’m interacting with people. My family members were introverts and it was hard talking to them about my problems because they could not relate to them. I guess staying in the house for a long time made me depressed thinking about the future after the pandemic.The only times I left my house was to out to help with groceries or when I really had to be somewhere.There were days that seem to drag on forever and I would spend those wishing to be with people. 

In June life did a big 180 on me. I heard a black man was trying to exercise and these white men shot him because “he wasn’t in the right community” like he seemed “dangerous”, later to find out his name is Ahmaud Arbery. My family was angry about what happened and we had discussions about being black in America. I was upset at the fact that the video was replaying on the news and social media like it was a trailer to a movie. The way he died was not okay. Many black men and women have been killed by the police and I don’t know why many people thought this was the first time something like this has happened. In my community we have been protesting  police brutality for more than 60 years. The riots started and that different cities around America were just on fire. Many people came out to protest and I wanted to but with covid and how dangerous it was. There were many peaceful protests that the news didn’t cover but they only showed the riots. My family and a couple of neighbors decided to clean the neighborhood as a way to protest together in a safe and secure way. We did take as many precautions as we could, staying 6 ft away from each other was one of them. It took two days and it was also relaxing because I just moved at the beginning of 2020 and for the first time seeing my neighbors. 

 After the protests, I started to realize I stayed in my room more often than usual, slept in more and such, but the news school had me excited for the first time in awhile . I wanted a hybrid system,which was where we was in school for day and others not, to get out of the house more, but a lot of my friends and their parents did not want to do hybrid and opted for instead virtual learning.I  wanted to agree with them but with my mental health declining I wanted the change of space to fix it. Even with my excitement for school it quickly became a lot for me and took up most of my time most days, not something I thought would happen. I was glad about the breaks we had and the overall lighter loads of homework and classwork we were given. Even though I was still home, I felt a little productive in trying to do activities at home. My friends and I were kind of worried because we weren’t really learning anything in some of our classes. 

Overall, I just wanted life to go back but at the same time I just wanted to go outside and spend time with one friend. Fast forward to now, I’m still doing school work and getting good grades. I’m just worried about how SATS would go for me and what I wanna become.  For now I am  getting used to the new normal.