BY NATHALY VAZQUEZ
Lives were changed during the year 2020 when COVID-19 officially started being a concern in the United States.
My life was changed on March 13, 2020; little did I know that that day would be my last day as a regular student.
I had never experienced a pandemic. I was still in middle school when the country had to go through being quarantined, and it was towards the middle of my eighth -grade year.
That year I changed a lot because I became more confident in myself and a sort of social butterfly, but everything changed after COVID.
Pre-pandemic I was doing really well with my grades and I was not afraid to speak in front of other people or to be who I was.
I was so social to the point where I would help a lot of people around my school when volunteers were needed and I was proud to talk and I was not shy at all.
When online learning began no one I knew had any idea how to navigate through it and that made learning really difficult.
There were also lots of awkwardness because it was the first time everyone saw each other through technology.
There were endless problems with the technology, the internet, and the means of communication; so in the end the pandemic took away my last months of being a middle schooler before transitioning to high school.
I personally, to this day really hate the way things went because my eighth grade year was supposed to be a great one and the way things were going I also believed I would have been really happy with my academic life.
The few months that I did spend doing online classes for my eighth grade year were nothing compared to how overwhelming the next months would be due to the fact that I had to figure out what school I would be attending for high school all through phone calls and emails that would usually not be answered.
The virus and pandemic both also took quite a negative toll on my mental health because I was not used to staying at home with my four siblings. I felt as if I had no room to breath at times and felt trapped.
I also began to overthink a lot and began to make myself panic by making my mind believe that I was isolated and that I would never be able to live a normal life again or the life I did before everything happened.
Even though there were a lot of negatives to the pandemic, some of the good things that came out of it were that I learned how to use technology better and learned that some relationships that I had were actually just acquaintances and nothing more.
In the end, I believe that COVID is something that affected every individual in one way or another.
We as a nation learned to slowly overcome it and now we should do anything and everything possible to not be in that position again, but if we were to go back, this time we would not be as lost as we were during the Coronavirus pandemic.
Nathaly Vazquez is a 16-year-old junior enrolled at Lassiter Early College. The oldest of five she has a goal to be successful and help her mom out in the future as much as she has helped her all her life.
