By Kelly Rosenau, Hope Church Youth
People don’t agree on much, but I think we can all agree that historians will probably look back on 2020 as one of those train-wreck years. Personally, I’ll never look at toilet paper or the word “unprecedented” in the same way. Everyone has struggled in different ways this past year. As teenagers, we have faced our own unique set of challenges. Many of us are busy with school and extracurriculars. Lots of teens have jobs and are learning to drive. Things like this were halted rather abruptly in March of 2020 for me. What followed was a lot of trying to stay busy and connected, and inevitably, loneliness.
At least in my family, our lives kind of revolve around school and school-related activities, so, when school closed our lives pretty much paused. All of a sudden we went from having a full schedule every day, to having… nothing. In an effort to keep our brains engaged during the rest of the school year, teachers put out optional weekly assignments that we could do to improve our grade in the class. Some teachers had weekly Zoom meetings, some didn’t. It was kind of a scramble to finish the year online.
For my part, before shutdown I was dealing with some burnout due to everything I was doing at the time. My older brother (a senior) and I (a freshman) were in our school’s musical. We were halfway through our run when we shut down. A week after we shut down, I was supposed to go to New York City with my orchestra class to play in Carnegie Hall. I was initially kind of grateful for the chance to do nothing. I slept for the first three days of lockdown. After that I tried to keep up with the weekly assignments from teachers, but I was pretty bummed about the musical and the orchestra trip. I had been pouring myself into those things for months and I felt like I didn’t have anything else to give. Eventually I sort of shut down. I tried to stay in touch with people at first, but once summer started I stopped reaching out and grew less responsive.
I didn’t see a lot of people outside of my COVID bubble, which consisted of my household and my grandma, until July. July was when I took Driver’s Ed. That was my first real bit of social interaction since March. We were outside at a park in lawn chairs, but we were in person. Never have I been so excited to see people my own age. Now, at this point I’d basically lost all ability to socialize and didn’t remember how to act in a classroom setting. I ended up having a friend in the class, and there was another girl who I kind of knew there. The three of us were all really socially deprived, and I’m surprised the instructor didn’t kick us out of the class for all the talking we did about things that weren’t driving related (e.g. dinosaur chicken nuggets).
I was kind of giddy after being able to talk like a teenager with other teenagers. In July, youth group met twice to do community service activities. This was also huge for me. While we were working on whatever task it happened to be, Pastor Beth just let us talk about whatever. Again, I think being able to act my age around other people my own age was kind of critical for my (declining) mental health. Up until then I had been feeling really detached and sad, but those activities were really helpful. I don’t love in-person school. There are a lot of people who aren’t compliant with safety guidelines, especially masking. This frustrates me, but school is where the people are.
If I’ve learned one thing from lockdown, it’s that I need people much more than I thought I did. I need other people my age.