How the Pandemic Really Feels--Abby

On March 13, 2020, I attended my last day of high school. (Complete side note, that was also my

17th birthday.) Fun, right? The last day of my high school experience wasn’t anything like I imagined it

to be. It started out better than normal, it was my birthday after all, but as the classes went on, something

was off. There was fear and anxiety hanging over everyone’s heads. So thick and so consuming, it almost

felt like you could physically touch it. I wasn’t prepared to be placed into quarantine for the next two

weeks when the last bell rang that day. And the two weeks after that. Or the exact same quarantine a year

later, desperately trying to find the shattered pieces of what my life was before. It has almost been a year

and I turn 18 on the anniversary of that fateful day in 2020. Turning 18 is supposed to be special right?

Maybe it used to be. Everyone expects me to be excited about my birthday, but it’s difficult to when all I

can hear are the angry and sad thoughts drowning out my days. All of the closure and finality that comes

with senior year was taken away from me. I haven’t managed to wrap my head around it to this day. For

the first three months, I was hopeful. For the beginning of my senior year, I believed we would go back

second semester. Currently, I feel too many emotions to make sense of my own sentiments. My first

instinct after realizing we wouldn’t get a traditional senior year was to shut off all emotion toward our

reality. It sounds incredibly stupid but it’s easier to block the feelings out than to release them all.

I’ve read these stories and seen what other seniors around the world have accomplished and how

they’ve grown throughout this pandemic. I look in the mirror, and I don’t recognize the person staring

back at me anymore. There is no extraordinary thing I’ve done. There is no milestone I completed. There

is nothing. The single achievement is my acceptance into several colleges so far. None of my dream

schools, but my family seems to be proud of me. They ask me, “Abbey, you’ve been accepted into every

school you applied to so far. You should be so happy. Why aren’t you happy?” What do I tell them?

“Yeah, I am happy but actually I’m not. I’m really sad all the time.” That would only push them to ask

more questions, give more sad looks, and question all of my behavior. I don’t want to be pitied. I want to

be understood. No one our age has lived through a pandemic. My parents got their senior years, my aunts,

my uncles, my cousins, and I am the only one who didn’t. It isn’t something as simple as missing Prom. It

isn’t the sadness that comes crashing down over me because I will never see my bestfriend play another

high school volleyball game. It’s everything we lost. To lose one thing is hard, to lose everything, is

completely another. I won’t get back the time. There is no Prom in college. High school sports games and

events will only happen for those after us. All of the unmade memories and experiences I was told for 17

years I would create, disappeared into thin air.

I wish I was a more positive person. When I read this all back to myself, it sounds awful and that

wasn’t my intention. My only wish is for people to understand. I believed my senior year would be

memorable. In hindsight, I can say that this year was memorable, but not in the way any of us expected it

to be. I realized that I did have a lot of amazing memories. With the three people that have been in my life

since freshman year, we tried to make the best out of the situation. Which is so incredible to say. To be

able to say that I got to spend my senior year making memories and having fun with people I met my first

year at Etiwanda, despite the pandemic, is the one positive I can take away from this journey. I only hope

to learn from my struggles and what we all endured for the past year eventually. The amount of loss that

we faced throughout the pandemic was unfair, but I have faith that our generation will only prevail and

grow from this experience.