Jayna Waters
“Yay! A week off from school!” This is what I thought in 2020 when I was told we were out of school because of a new virus. However, little did I know that the virus would change my life. That day was the last day I would step foot into a school until my sophomore year of high school. I was in eighth grade then and now I am a graduating senior.
It feels like someone pressed pause and finally decided to press play. Mentally, there is a gap in my life and time jumped from 2020 to 2024. I am about to be 18, but my mind is still stuck in my 13-year-old body. It feels like these past four years have left me behind and I am trying to play catch up.
Being subjected to my freshman year virtually really took a toll on my life. In middle school, I was a social butterfly. Sadly, being at home all the time, not being allowed to be around peers made my social life nonexistent.
During the pandemic, my mother did not allow me to have social media (a main source of meeting new people). Once I finally did attend in-person class, students already knew each other and created friend groups. I felt like an outsider and because of that it took me a while to make new friends. The isolation of the pandemic made me timid about talking to new people.
The transition from middle school to high school is a crucial time for students to find out who they are.
I am now a senior and have figured out how to navigate high school life, but I must now decipher what I want to do with the rest of my life and frankly I do not feel prepared. Yes, I am one of the students at the top of my class, but other seniors and I are on mental overload.
Although we have reached the age where we must make the decision about where we want to go to college and what career we want to pursue, many of us do not feel like we have fully gotten enough experiences to know ourselves enough to make these decisions. Graduation is approaching fast. The class of 2024, being the last class to know what it was like to be in high school during the pandemic,
