During quarantine, I struggled with everything imaginable within my two-hundred-square-foot room. I had to deal with events from my family members dying, my work ethic declining, to spending my time learning how to make whipped coffee.  This may sound like a common thing occurring in people’s lives today (and probably still when you are reading this), going from being a “work hard, play hard” type student, I fell into a spiral that occurred of waking up late and procrastinating my assignments. The hard part was not living through quarantine but the after-effects of it.  In my senior year (current), life has felt as if I was a freshman all over again learning how to handle a bunch of classes with the benefit of college preparation and standardized testing.  

My first semester of the senior year consisted of trying to pay attention in my classes but resulted in panic attacks from not understanding the material. Volleyball used to be my happy place until this year.  It was added work that I didn’t enjoy as much as I used to.   The spiral continued, but as it went down farther I couldn’t find a reason to come back up. 

Being stuck at home became normal and no matter how much I hated it I had to get used to it.  I had to get used to “not-s0-good” habits; laying in bed for my virtual class on my Apple Mac 2020 computer, copying homework answers from my $20 a month Chegg membership, and not showering for consecutive days in a row.  Then we have the habits that at the end of the day have negatively impacted me to this day; after class, during quarantine, I could go straight to my club meetings online then five minutes later, I could be doing my homework or watching Netflix.  In reality (aka non-quarantine time), my routine consisted of the same but time was taken when driving to places and back, and talking to those people you run into even though you have your AirPods in (during this time having headphones in is a wordless way of saying “don’t bother me,” which takes more time and energy than virtually.