It was only Feb. 27, 2020 — a mere 17 months ago — that the first school in the United States due to COVID-19.

Somehow it seems longer in pandemic time.

For students, like everyone else, that temporal elasticity could be chalked up to a host of things, from the monotony of quarantine to isolation from family and friends to the mostly invisible barriers between the spaces where we worked, played and dreamed.

In March 2020, The 74 launched “Pandemic Notebook,” an intimate series designed to capture, in their own words, how students are living through this strange period.

Few understood how long it would last. Initially, it just seemed like Spring Break was taking . But then the goalposts for a return to normalcy kept shifting: the end of the school year, the fall, the conclusion of Biden’s “First 100 Days.”

It still hasn’t happened.

For students in a once-unthinkable year two of pandemic school, the stories deepened as quarantine wore on. Some grappled with young love in a time of virtual connection; others, locked inside their homes, experienced the deep trauma of parental abuse. They faced issues that are perennial: privilege, college and equity, making new friends. They also tried new things. A fifth-grader in Michigan took advantage of learning from home to care for a neighbor’s ducks and chickens. A high school junior in Chicago recommitted to education and his love of physics after a 3 a.m. epiphany watching Neil deGrasse Tyson videos on YouTube. And a New York City senior who scoured her apartment building for a decent Wi-Fi signal discovered something better: her neighbors.

Here are their stories.

‘Returning’ to school

WELCOME TO PANDEMIC SCHOOL, YEAR TWO: For students starting a new school year, there are advantages to going virtual. An extra 45 minutes of sleep, for one. Not having to pack a lunch. Avoiding the disgusting bathrooms that are seemingly impossible to avoid in any building occupied by so many adolescents. But as Sadie Bograd writes, much is lost: “Going back to school simply didn’t feel like much of a meaningful shift after a similarly Zoom-filled and homebound summer.” Her school in Lexington, Kentucky, started the semester entirely online. But as she started school, moving from class to class, or link to link, she found several small reasons to be hopeful. Some teachers adorned their Canvas pages with virtual Bitmoji classrooms, their avatars guiding students to important links. Others went on fascinating tangents and rambling digressions. “In short,” Bograd writes, “my teachers’ personalities managed to come through the small box they occupied on my laptop, reassuring me that even without the possibility of face-to-face interaction, I’ll still be able to make meaningful connections.”

Read Sadie’s story here.

Pain and loss

A GRANDFATHER’S DEATH & A MEDITATION ON COVID’S MENTAL HEALTH TOLL: “The day I found out my grandfather died, I cried so hard I threw up,” Cindy Chen writes. “Two days later, I went back to school.” When Chen’s parents, both Chinese nationals, tried to start a new life for their family in New York City, her grandparents raised her in China, where she lived until she was 5. It was her grandparents who “took me to the park, cooked my favorite meals and tucked me in at night.” She remembers mischievously hiding her grandfather’s cigarettes and how he’d chuckle and call her a “bed egg.” His death, a world away and during the pandemic, was devastating. “I walked through the front doors holding back tears,” the New Jersey high school junior writes. “It wasn’t that I felt uncomfortable crying in public. I just wanted to avoid combining a mask with a runny nose.” In this piece, she reflects on the pandemic’s mental health toll and how the effects have fallen harder on young people, like her, who suffered from loneliness and depression even before COVID-19.

Read Cindy’s story here.

DOMESTIC ABUSE DURING QUARANTINE: “For as long as I can remember, I was a bird trapped in a golden cage. On the outside, my world was a glittering array of debate trophies, academic titles, college scholarships and a picture-perfect family. But no one knew the fractured portrait that was my abusive household.” So begins one student’s story of coping with toxic parents as COVID-19 took away the safe haven of school. As of 2020, 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 children reported being victims of domestic abuse, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — and the pressures of quarantine are likely to worsen those grim statistics. The author, who wrote anonymously out of concerns for her safety, said that like many teens who have been victims of abuse, being forced to stay at home was a prescription for danger: “In essence, my home life was a ticking time bomb.”

Read the full account here.

Trying something new

HOW NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON SAVED MY YEAR: Shortly after the pandemic began, Chicago high school senior Jimmy Rodgers “fully expected everything to just continue going downhill as the world made less and less sense.” The idea of being locked in the same room made him unimaginably depressed. The only time he got to leave the house was to bury his grandmother. But everything changed one day at 3 a.m., when he watched a video of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on YouTube. “I came to a startling conclusion,” he writes. “I was the person needed to solve the mysteries of the universe.” Tyson’s optimism and passion were infectious, Rodgers said, pushing him to do better in physics and commit himself to a career teaching and helping others in the Black community. “To my surprise,” he writes, “education gave me something to be happy about, rather than numb, at a time when all my days felt the same.”

Read Jimmy’s story here.

FOR THIS FIFTH-GRADER, SCHOOL WAS FOWL: For Zora Borcila-Miller, a fifth-grader in East Lansing, Michigan, the pandemic has sometimes been lonely. Once, she got so bored she made a twin out of her clothes, a pillow and some broomsticks. She’s been learning remotely since the pandemic began, but when she and her dad moved to a new house in downtown Lansing, six blocks from the Capitol, she met her neighbor’s ducks and chickens. Zora describes the “hands-on and interactive” education she got while school was virtual. “When I’m at school, I’m usually on the couch with my computer,” she writes. “I have never talked to my teacher in person, only on Zoom. And it’s OK. But, in school, we never got to meet a duckling born the day before.”

Read Zora’s story here.

Equity and privilege

COVID-19 RAISES STAKES FOR COLLEGE ADMISSIONS: Bridgette Adu-Wadier always knew she would enroll in college — the more prestigious, the better. But as the daughter of Ghanian immigrants, she didn’t always know how. For her family, education was the Way Out, she writes. “It was also a way to set a precedent for my younger siblings, lift my family up from poverty and potentially change their economic trajectory for generations.” The pandemic placed fresh obstacles in the way of that pursuit. Because of her parents’ work schedules, she had to homeschool her younger siblings. That, in addition to her rigorous academic routine, caused her to lose sleep. “I discovered a glaring similarity between college admissions and the pandemic,” she writes. “Both are difficult for everyone, but harder for some students than others.”

Read Bridgette’s story here.

MASK CONFUSION, AND A LESSON ON PRIVILEGE: In May, high school senior Ianne Salvosa crossed the graduation stage at Liberty High School, outside St. Louis, and accepted her diploma. But the lessons she’ll be taking with her to college will go far beyond academics. The past year of fighting over mask requirements has left her with some uncomfortable feelings about her classmates. Students, many of whom openly doubted the efficacy of vaccines, fought with teachers over wearing masks. Long before vaccinations were commonplace, administrators frequently walked the halls with masks down. “Like all seniors who have lived through the past year, I understand burnout,” she writes. “But it appears our academic fatigue has seeped into our response to the pandemic.” The cavalier attitude toward masks, she said, “feels like some sort of show we put on so that the rest of the world can believe we did our part. It’s an ugly feeling I’ll take with me into college and beyond the current crisis.”

Read Ianne’s story here.

Making connections, finding love

SEARCHING FOR WI-FI, STUDENT DISCOVERED HER NEIGHBORS: When New York City’s schools went remote in March 2020, Ilana Drake was stuck. Knowing the strongest Wi-Fi signal in her family’s small apartment emanated from the front closet, she set up base camp in a common hallway outside, across from the elevator. Then a strange thing happened: She began to listen. “You can hear everything in the hallway,” she writes. “I heard snippets of conversation from nearby apartments: marital arguments, frustrated parents, stock trades, kids engaging in homeschooling and, of course, a symphony of barking dogs.” She also got to know her neighbors and the building’s staff. Drake has a learning disability and recently graduated from the city’s High School for Math, Science and Engineering. But in the hallway, she learned that everyone had some sort of “academic backstory,” including the neighbor who dreaded standardized tests and the service technician who had been an engineer in the Dominican Republic and helped her with calculus. “Working in the hallway,” she wrote, “provided me with a passport to conversations that went beyond ‘hello’ and ‘have a good day.’”

Read Ilana’s story here.

YOUNG LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID-19: Ila Kumar remembers her pre-pandemic dating life with a whiff of nostalgia: the “charming absurdity of pretending you are older than you are, wearing itchy sweaters in bad restaurants, knowing the 15-year-old across from you is going to insist he pays for your slice of pizza.” Now, Kumar writes of the difficulties of navigating the tricky waters of teenage romance at a time of swiftly changing guidelines regarding masks and social distancing. “Maybe I forgot what it means to get to know someone — to uncover their secret talent for impressions, learn the way their hands move when they dance to music in the car and remember how they smell,” she writes. “Every corner of a relationship requires work, and the specter of something as small as unanswered messages, wanting eye contact and being left without it, and midnight arguments requires the singular power of trust.”

Read Ila’s story here.

The day I found out my grandfather died, I cried so hard I threw up. Two days later, I went back to school.

I walked through the front doors holding back tears. It wasn’t that I felt uncomfortable crying in public. I just wanted to avoid combining a mask with a runny nose.

First period went by without a hitch. Second period was on track to end the same way until I decided to verbally respond to an email from my history teacher. At the time, my school had a hybrid schedule with three rotating groups. For example, if Cohort A was in school on Monday, Cohorts B and C would do school virtually.

The night before coming into school that day, I’d sent my teacher a message. The email read: “Hi Mrs. Hollman, yesterday after school, I found out that my grandfather had passed away. I just wanted to let you know in case I ever started crying during class. I’m trying my best to hold myself together, but I just can’t help it.”

She responded: “So sorry to hear that. It sounds like you were close. How old was he? When’s the funeral? If you need to turn off your camera or step off Zoom any time I understand.” Two simple questions, and yet I couldn’t send a reply. Looking back, I realize that I waited because the grief trapped in my body had nowhere to go.

Why? That’s a long story. It makes me think about how hard the isolation of the pandemic has been on kids my age, particularly those who had previously battled loneliness and depression.

When I was born, my parents lived in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn. They wanted to move to the suburbs to raise their family but hadn’t saved up enough money. With only my dad working (and my mom staying at home to take care of me), my parents eventually decided to send me to China to live with my grandparents. By the time my parents finally bought a house in the suburbs, I was five years old. At the time, moving back to the United States was an unwelcome and drastic change. I didn’t understand a word of English, and my grandparents were all I knew. They took me to the park, cooked my favorite meals, and tucked me in at night.

For as long as I knew him, my grandfather had a nicotine addiction. He started smoking cigarettes at fourteen, and the problem only worsened as he got older. By the time he reached his sixties, he could not walk up a flight of stairs without heaving. He never had cigarettes in his pockets, but it was hard not to notice the smell. During my stay in China, I followed him everywhere to make sure he didn’t smoke. I even spied on him from behind curtains. Once, I caught him hiding a cigarette on the ledge of the stone wall that surrounded the house. After he walked away, I rushed out and stood on my tippy toes, feeling for the cigarette along the length of the wall. When I found it, I ripped it in half, emptied out the contents, and left it there for my grandfather to find.

I did annoying things like that a lot, but my grandfather never raised his voice at me or told me to leave him alone. He’d just chuckle and call me a “bad egg.”

Unlike my relationship with my grandfather, the one I share with my parents has always been tense. My parents are what you might consider “typical immigrants.” They’re Chinese nationals who left in their early twenties to pursue a better life for themselves and their future children. For them, discussing mental or emotional health has never been easy or necessary. When you grow up splitting a single egg with your siblings, there is no time for “feeling blue.”

Whenever I struggled with difficult emotions, my parents did as well. Loneliness was met with anger, sadness with dismissiveness, fear with biting words. I have never felt comfortable speaking to my parents about my emotional or mental wellbeing, and only do so when I want to feel worse than I already do. In other words, never. It doesn’t help that my parents are barely home: They leave for work hours before school ends and come home minutes before I’m about to fall asleep. I know that owning and operating a restaurant isn’t easy, but I wish I had time to say more than “good morning” and “good night.”

My brother isn’t exactly someone I can confide in either. He’s five years younger than I am, and didn’t have the same close relationship with our grandfather. To him, grandpa was some old guy who lived on the other side of the world. I didn’t know how to explain to him, or any of my friends, that knowing grandpa isn’t somewhere on earth felt like a part of me was being violently ripped away. So I stayed silent, isolated, unsure of how to cope.

At the end of second period, once all the students left, I turned to Mrs. Hollman and said, “He was about to be eighty.” I remember tightly clenching my hands, digging my nails into my palm. But once the first tear broke free, the rest followed in an unbroken stream. I then blubbered out everything I had been holding in. I finally had someone to listen to all the words I wanted to say. I don’t remember exactly what Mrs. Hollman said. No quantity or quality of words could ease the pain, but that’s okay. At least she listened.

After arriving at my next class, I quickly asked to go to the bathroom so I could clean myself up. Luckily, I was the only person in there — awkward stares and questions avoided. I blew my nose, wiped my mask, put it back on, and tried all the .

I have these memorized because in freshman year, when my depression and anxiety were unmanageable, I’d often randomly burst into tears. I think every one of my teachers from ninth grade saw me cry at least once.

The first time I acknowledged my mental health problems was with my eighth grade English teacher. A toxic friendship, low self-esteem, and persistent feelings of failure made me wish I could stop waking up in the morning — at the age of fourteen. In school, I would stare at a wall without noticing that an entire period had gone by.

My English teacher at the time, Mrs. Doane, noticed my odd behavior and pulled me aside after class one day to ask whether I was okay. The answer was no, but that’s not what I said. Mrs. Doane didn’t believe me, and I’m glad she didn’t. By continuing to use the power of, “How are you?” she gradually got me to open up. And through our conversations, I learned that I needed professional help.

It took me three years of consistent, agonizing steps in the right direction — steps so microscopic that they didn’t seem to exist at all— before I finally felt I was meant to live.

Death from COVID-19 complications isn’t something most students have to worry about. But the consequences of pandemic-induced social isolation shouldn’t be underestimated. A surge of in Clark County, Nevada, convinced district officials that schools need to reopen as quickly as possible. from the Centers for Disease Control found that emergency room visits for suspected suicide attempts among teens increased 31 percent last year compared to 2019; for teen girls, the attempts were over 50 percent higher.

Reaching out to students struggling with depression may seem next to impossible when teachers and administrators have so much to deal with as a result of the pandemic. But I know I wouldn’t have made it this far without my teachers.

Students certainly need additional help. I have an idea about how technology can be used to open a new frontier in mental health support. Students, with the help of their guidance counselors, could launch peer-support video conferences. Although these conferences wouldn’t replace professional counseling, they could help students cope. Any time during lunch or even after school, a student who is struggling could join such a group and talk with a fellow student who is there to empathize, ask questions — and most importantly — to listen.

It’s been five months since my grandfather passed. Things have gotten better. Sometimes an entire day passes where I don’t think of him at all. But on the days that I do, I feel a deep sense of longing that nothing can alleviate.

I’ll be a senior next year, so I’ve started looking at colleges, thinking about prospective majors and planning my future. But although life goes on, I’d give anything to call my grandfather again and tell him one more time to stop smoking.

Cindy Chen is a junior at James Caldwell High School in Caldwell, New Jersey.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

Eating in class is typically allowed in my school. However, due to the pandemic, some teachers have limited snacking to the cafeteria so students can remain masked in the classroom.

The student refused to stop eating. The cycle of chewing, pleading and refusal repeated about five times.

In Missouri, I’ve had to swim upstream when it comes to masks in school. Denial of the virus’s validity isn’t uncommon, and doubts about the efficacy of masks often follows. The term “mask up” has become a cliché at this point, and students have become tired of the piece of cloth standing in the way of a typical school year. I can’t say I’m surprised by this defiance in a red state, but the ignorance and selfishness on display behind school doors goes beyond politics.

Through my peers’ TikToks and GroupMe texts, they have found platforms to air their disbelief of COVID-19’s harm. The frequently proclaimed of those infected has warped into a shield that makes young people feel invincible. However, that 1 percent should still strike fear into students. If everyone in my school of about 1,516 students got infected, a 99 percent survival rate would mean about 15 students would die.

I keep hearing the same misconstrued data point in the hallways. But as I witnessed the argument between the substitute teacher and my classmate, I realized that data was not a sufficient motivation to mask up — nor was empathy. The substitute explained that if the boy tested positive, she would be quarantined and unable to work for two weeks. His refusal persisted.

I’m reminded of this incident because in a matter of days, I’ll be walking across the graduation stage with my fellow seniors. As June 6 approaches, I’ve seen more and more students in the halls with no masks. Like all seniors who have lived through the past year, I understand burnout. But it appears our academic fatigue has seeped into our response to the pandemic. Our cavalier adherence to wearing masks feels like some sort of show we put on so that the rest of the world can believe we did our part. It’s an ugly feeling I’ll take with me into college and beyond the current crisis.

I get it. Mask guidance can be confusing. But by the Centers for Disease Control found infection rates were 37 percent lower in schools where teachers and staff were required to wear masks. The CDC has said that universal masking should continue at schools, at least through the end of the current school year. As for the fall, it may be too early to tell what schools can do before all students are vaccinated.

My school district only requires masks when social distancing is not feasible. But not only is enforcement of this rule nonexistent, we lack decent role models. When I walked to my next class after the sandwich incident, I saw my principal lowering his mask to speak to another administrator. This was in early March, long before most adults were fully vaccinated. One day, after I was exposed to a girl who was COVID-positive at my lunch table, I left through the main office and got signed out by a secretary who had no mask at all. Just a thin piece of glass separated her from various students and visitors who came and went (I was quarantined for 10 days until I tested negative for COVID-19).

My school district has released a of masks suitable for school and deemed safe by the CDC and the St. Charles County Department of Public Health. But the list is just a set of recommendations, still permitting the use of improper masks while school is in session.

the CDC recommendation “to prioritize universal and correct use of masks” by prohibiting mask mandates. Under pressure from legislators and parents, have already lifted mask requirements.

With teenagers starting to be vaccinated in large numbers, we see that an end is potentially near, a time when masks and other precautionary measures . I’m still waiting for this time. I don’t trust my peers to get vaccinated, having heard their doubts about its efficacy loudly expressed in the hallways and on social media.

As typical end-of-the-year celebrations like prom or graduation approached, my fellow seniors yearned for those events to be “normal.” However, each time that word got thrown around to describe the senior year we imagined, I was left wondering why we should be the exception to countless sacrifices people around the world have made during the pandemic. At the end of the day, my affluent public high school in the St. Louis area is still privileged enough to enjoy daily aspects of a regular school year, while other districts have not. We prioritized in-person instruction, which we have received for a majority of the year, but lower income school districts nearby have only had in-person instruction since March.

I won’t be attending college in Missouri, but I know that other places around the U.S. have experienced mask resistance. As I make this transition, I look back at my creative writing class and wonder if I should have stepped in. Would it have made a difference? Would the student have pulled his mask up if his classmates stood with the substitute teacher? Accountability has become very important to me. I feel responsible for my environment, for who could be with me during the next sandwich vs. mask debacle. I believe wearing a mask in school is a sign of respect, a way to show that I care about my peers’ safety and they care about mine.

When COVID-19 becomes a piece of history, I will not forget who was among those who failed to realize their “normal senior year” came at the expense of their classmates’ safety. I’m not one to burn bridges, but I know which of my peers to keep at arm’s length. As I prepare for college, I’m cautious about meeting my new classmates. I wonder if they were like the students at my school, masks down and privilege high. I want to surround myself with those who chose safety and respect.

Ianne Salvosa will be graduating from Liberty High School in Lake St. Louis, Missouri, on June 6. In the fall, she plans to attend George Washington University.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

Taking care of birds is hard work, but I like it. I have been going to school online since the coronavirus pandemic started but some of the most interesting things I’ve learned are from working chickens and ducks in my neighbor’s backyard.

Six months ago, I did not know anything about ducks except that the ducks at Michigan State University would race for the pieces of bread I threw for them. Then my dad and I moved to our new house in Lansing.

Amanda, the owner of the ducks, lives across the street. I met her when my grandparents were over at our home and their Irish setter was very intrigued by the loud quacking. Amanda and Preston, our neighbors, were outside at a fire. We introduced ourselves, but I was more interested in my grandparents’ dog.

But one of the next times we saw her, Amanda invited me to come into the back and hang with ducks.

At first, whenever Amanda handed me a chicken or duck, I would drop them as soon as they started to wiggle. The first thing I ever learned was how to hold a chicken. You hold them under your arm like a football. The first chicken I held was named Pringles. She’s one of the escape artists.

Soon, I started coming over to see the ducks and chickens after school. I learned to collect eggs, change and turn bedding, spread out hay on the yard and chase ducks back up the block when they escaped. After I got more experienced, Amanda said I could come even when she wasn’t out.

When the weather turned cold, I learned to put oil and wax on the chickens’ and ducks’ feet to prevent frostbite and mites. It’s a tricky task. They wiggle a lot. I’m learning to identify bumblefoot, a kind of infection. I have learned that pekin ducks are the big white ones and that barred rock chickens are black and white.

I’ve learned that ducks like to snuggle.

I go to school in East Lansing, and I have been learning online for more than a year. This year we have been learning about slavery and fractions and decimals and water systems. When I’m at school, I’m usually on the couch with my computer. I have never talked to my teacher in person, only on Zoom.

And it’s OK.

But, in school, we never got to meet a duckling born the day before. A duckling named Haystack hatched about a week ago. This little one has already escaped and been pursued by Amanda’s cats. She’s fluffy and yellow and makes tiny peep sounds.

Sometimes the pandemic has been lonely. One time, I got so bored I made a twin out my own clothes, a pillow and some broomsticks. I’m mostly looking forward to the fall, when I’ll be back in school again in person, but I’ll miss all the time I’ve had with the ducks and chickens.

And I don’t plan to stop hanging out with them or helping Amanda.

Learning about ducks and chickens has been hands on and interactive. It’s fun. And it makes me want to keep learning and keep snuggling these cuties.

Zora Borcila-Miller is a fifth-grader at Pinecrest Elementary School in East Lansing, Michigan.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

There is a breed of champion racehorses, which in order to win, bite their own necks to get more oxygen. I think about these horses a lot.

Once, in an easier time, I pretended to browse a sushi menu with great intensity. I don’t even like fish. Across from me was my date, and next to me was my best friend sitting in front of her date, who was sitting next to his friend who was sitting across from his date. It turned out the third couple didn’t like fish either — they each ate a bowl of white rice. By the end of the night, their bill was two dollars.

A few months later, I scoured the menu at an Italian restaurant which had plastic grape vines hanging from the ceiling. Another one of these dates. I recognized with embarrassing clarity the flavored coolness of our young waitress’ breath — perky, minty breath only achieved through a tiny ghost rushing out of a menthol Juul pod.

I remember my life before this year with fondness because a) that is the nature of nostalgia, and b) there is something charming in the absurdity of pretending you are older than you are, wearing itchy sweaters in bad restaurants, knowing the fifteen year-old across from you is going to insist he pays for your slice of pizza; being smushed into the space between two couch cushions at a basement party; using a lighter, a needle, and a red delicious to add two more holes to your ears.

Now, I am a senior in my last semester of high school. It has been over a year since quarantine started. We have run out of nutmeg. How does that happen? There have been a lot of days like this. Although the evenings of making my hair smooth and eyelashes spidery are far from over — this year nevertheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it.

The world was reaching out to us in the form of bad news. The warmth of the summer came with a background glow of violence and tragedy: the twin emergencies of COVID-19 and racial injustice. Growing up, metabolizing hatred like daily bread, drinking shock along with our morning coffee.

In June, this boy would send me pictures of his breakfast. Homemade huevos rancheros impressed me. Soon enough, I was taking breath mints before we talked on the phone. I remember begging my mom to let me see him. He begged too, in a more subtle way — offering to sanitize the car when he got to my house, and he’d drive with the windows down. Whatever I was doing — cultivating a taste for navy blue sweatshirts and at-home workouts, reading books on my roof to feel like I was out of the house — was a life of sustained waiting, anticipation pooling like day-old rainwater.

I remember the first time he drove me home. His hands never left 9 and 3 on the steering wheel. The third time he drove me home, his left hand stayed on the wheel, but the right was in my hand. The thirty-fifth time, he drove to my house alone. His left hand was driving and his right hand was gripping the glass shoulder of a vase, trying to prevent water from spilling. He brought me roses, and a note that said he was sorry.

It could be my distance from everyone else that amplifies my closeness to him. Maybe I forgot what it means to get to know someone — to uncover their secret talent for impressions, learn the way their hands move when they dance to music in the car, and remember how they smell. Every corner of a relationship requires work, and the specter of something as small as unanswered messages, wanting eye contact and being left without it, and midnight arguments requires the singular power of trust. When we fight, I never need to bite my own neck for oxygen in order to win. Instead, it’s like we’ve raced each other up a set of stairs, and we are pausing, out of breath, thinking about how foolish it was.

In the coming fall, we are both going to college, but we are committed to our hairy experiment in attachment. Sometimes, I think maybe this is the kind of optimism that is going to hurt to look back on. Like I have slipped on a banana peel into love, or I’ve fallen out of a moving car into oncoming traffic into roadkill kind of love. Except — when I look at him, I feel safe. After this year, that’s more than I could ever ask for.

Ila Kumar is a senior at Oakwood Friends School, a private school in Poughkeepsie, NY.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

It goes without saying, but last year was strange and rough for everyone. I lost my grandmother, watched the world rally against police brutality and saw school descend into chaos.

I fully expected everything to just continue going downhill as the world made less and less sense. Like most people during the pandemic, being locked in the same room for what felt like forever made me unimaginably depressed. The only time I got to leave the house was to bury my grandmother.

In the beginning of the pandemic, the idea of being able to “enjoy” my schoolwork, even from the comfort of my own bed, felt like a paradox. I’ve never been a bad student by any sense of the word, but I always tried to separate school from my personal life. The pandemic made that impossible.

I figured I had to focus on something besides the subtitles to the YouTube videos I was watching because I couldn’t hear them over the chips I was eating. But oddly enough, those random YouTube videos pushed me to where I am now.

One random day, at 3 a.m., I came to a startling conclusion: I was the person needed to solve the mysteries of the universe.

The revelation came when YouTube’s mysterious algorithm recommended a video of Neil deGrasse Tyson discussing water towers. It told me entirely too much about something I thought I’d never think about again. But even now, I sometimes blurt out, “Fun fact: The rings on a water tower get closer together the closer they are to the bottom of the tower because the water is heavier down there.” Here in Chicago, most people don’t see water towers on tops of buildings, and that’s what made it so interesting to me. From there, I dove further into his work and quickly found myself moving from water towers to theories about the “multiverse.” Admittedly, it was a steep learning curve.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s discussions of the fundamentals of astrophysics hooked me more than any Netflix show. There was just something about Tyson that kept me coming back and trying to pick his brain apart. I wanted to be like him and talk endlessly with others about the wonders of the universe.

Almost every night, I would pretend I knew what he was saying and attempt to apply this newfound “knowledge” to life as I knew it. Then I thought to myself: This would be a lot easier if I just studied what he’s talking about. I officially decided that AP Physics and physics as a whole was something that I really wanted to devote myself to.

To my surprise, education gave me something to be happy about, rather than numb, at a time when all my days felt the same. Having a third of my day fly by because I was too busy figuring out gravitational potential energy was rewarding enough. But feeling like I was actually productive at a time when productivity no longer seemed to matter offered a solace I didn’t know I needed. It kept me together to the point where I no longer feared I’d break. A lot of students kind of gave up at this point in the pandemic. So when I became the only student to show up to some of the Google Meets for help and saw my teachers smile because this was the first time they felt they were really able to do their jobs during the pandemic, it made me feel seen and valued. It made everything feel just the tiniest bit normal.

Physics was a bit hard and frustrating at first, but by the end of Honors Physics last year I had my own mini-Tyson moment: Someone asked me for help with their test. They initially wanted me to take the test for them, then thanked me for instead staying on the phone for an hour to discuss the material and explain it so they not only understood the test, but aced it. It made me realize how much I knew, and how effortlessly I was able to explain it to someone who had ignored school for months.

I never felt more like Neil than in that moment. In fact, whenever I feel as if I’m losing my determination, I go back to his videos about those pointless water towers to get rejuvenated. I had no idea how hard AP Physics was going to be. There were a few times where I felt defeated after taking a test that I knew I was going to fail before I even started, and all I had left to keep me pushing forward was Neil convincing me that it was only a low point, not the end. I realized that what I loved about his work is that he loved his work. I never wanted to be as smart as Tyson — that felt impossible. I just wanted to care as much as he did.

I decided to do for others what Tyson unintentionally did for me. As of September 2020, I’ve been a member of the , a network of students across the country taking grassroots action to create change in their schools and communities. A few months later, I joined the student council, an organizing committee of students with the goal of improving schools through more equitable, effective and efficient policies. At the same time, I’m pursuing a career as a teacher through , an Illinois scholarship aimed at tackling the teacher shortage in schools of need. Hopefully, I’ll be empowering youth and pushing them to become the people they want to be — something I didn’t really have growing up. , which made me not believe in myself. I hope for a world where no students have to doubt themselves.

I recently met my English teacher’s niece, who is not only a Golden Apple scholar but a huge chemistry buff. She practically slammed a stack of Golden Apple paperwork on her desk, and with a smile that said, “This ain’t my first rodeo, kid,” began to break down the processes of Golden Apple and how to prepare for them. The biggest takeaway was just to be myself. After speaking to her, I can wholeheartedly say I’ve never believed someone more when they said, “The world needs someone like you.” Because of my teachers (and their nieces) I now know that if I want the next generation to understand that what they will do with their knowledge 20 years from now matters, what I do with my knowledge now has to matter as well.

The pandemic won’t last forever. I will be returning back to school in Chicago pretty soon, two days out of the week. I’m not worried. In fact, I’m very excited to return to normal with this newfound look on life. I’m a senior in my last semester. I just hope it’s not too late for me to make as big of an impact as I’d like. I only started this journey close to the end of my junior year. It kind of sucks to think how much further along I’d be to becoming a teacher and a voice for educational equity if I’d started earlier. I just hope that “normal” doesn’t mean a loss of motivation. I don’t think it will. I’ve come too far over the past year to just give up. I hope for a better tomorrow and I feel as if it’s finally coming.

My only fear is that being 6 feet apart will be too close for comfort. I’ve gotten used to not having to explain my choices as an introvert.

Jimmy Rodgers is a senior at George Westinghouse College Preparatory High School in Chicago.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

Before the shutdowns, I had a fixed routine. I’d arrive at 7:15 a.m., in search of a math or science teacher holding morning office hours. Class sizes are large, and I’m sometimes hesitant to ask questions during the regular school day because some of my classmates see it as a sign of weakness. So the morning was pretty much my only opportunity to get answers. I took a total of nine classes. When school ended, I stayed until 4:15 to see if any of my afternoon teachers were available. Then the second shift of my day began with a mad dash down the hill to the subway in order to be on time for extracurricular activities located all over Manhattan and, sometimes, a different borough. When I got home at 7:30, the third shift began. I went downstairs to my apartment building’s common room to access the free Wi-Fi and I spread the contents of my backpack onto the large rectangular table next to the window.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

When COVID-19 swept over New York City and the schools shut down, I was prepared to sit at my usual spot in the common room — until it closed. On that day, ominous looking yellow “caution” tape obstructed the front door. After noticing that other common rooms, as well as the local library and coffee shop in my neighborhood, closed due to the pandemic, I knew I was stuck.

About my building: You could say I’m well-off compared to many students in the New York City public school system. Nearly seventy percent of the students in the city are at or below poverty level. I know many of those students struggle more than me due to poor Wi-Fi and a lack of devices. But even in my relative affluence, I am not immune from internet headaches. Because my bedroom lacked reliable Wi-Fi, I needed a quiet place with a stable signal to log on to my classes. I was unable to focus in the living room, where my father’s booming voice resonated throughout our small apartment during his frequent conference calls. Knowing that the strongest signal came from our front closet, I set up base camp outside in the common hallway, diagonally across from the elevator. For the rest of the school year, and much of the summer, I’d bring my portable desk and office chair into the hallway to complete my schoolwork.

There were tradeoffs. Because my school day ended two hours earlier than usual, I had more time to process my coursework. When I went to an actual school, some of my overcrowded classes had more than 80 students and frequently, not enough desks; now I had a desk of my own. As a result, the background noise that filled my brain during my large in-person classes was replaced by something quieter.

And then a strange thing happened: I began to listen. You can hear everything in the hallway. I heard snippets of conversation from nearby apartments: marital arguments, frustrated parents, stock trades, kids engaging in homeschooling, and, of course, a symphony of barking dogs. I became more interested in my neighbors. I opened up about my learning difference, as I spent hours every afternoon with my Princeton Review AP Calculus review book trying to learn material that seemed so intuitive to my classmates.

Those books became conversation pieces as my neighbors waited for the elevator. I learned that almost every one of them had some sort of academic “backstory.” For example, one neighbor told me about how lost she felt in high school calculus and how she subsequently shied away from math in college. Another informed me of his dread of standardized tests. These stories comforted me and allowed me to have “real” conversations at a time when we were discouraged from interacting with friends in-person.

I also got to know the building’s staff. While I could have (and probably should have) been asked to leave the hallway, I was encouraged by the staff to stay and “study hard.” The staff knew that education was the key to advancement in the United States. I learned one of them, a service technician, had been an engineer in the Dominican Republic, and knew some calculus concepts better than I did. When I was struggling to comprehend volume with the Washer Method of revolving objects, for example, he converted the spatial concepts to language that catered to my strengths. Another staff worker’s daughter was studying in her building’s stairwell. During this time, I realized that working in the hallway provided me with a passport to conversations that went beyond “hello” and “have a good day.”

As the months dragged on, I became a fixture in the hallway. During school days, my teachers and classmates adjusted to seeing delivery persons dashing through my background on the way to my next door neighbors. I made a mental note of which restaurants in our area were open for take out. Upon devoting two hours each afternoon to calculus, I realized that I had gained a greater focus and was able to learn the material. In Covid-time, my loaded march became more of a quiet stroll.

Towards the end of the summer, my parents switched from cable internet to a different network that provides coverage to the entire apartment. I now use my room for Zoom because it’s safer than being outside in the hallway or the common room. But I miss regularly seeing my neighbors. While I still get enthusiastic “hellos” and bits and pieces of conversation through the elevator rides to and from the lobby, I yearn for the small moments. Like the time one of my neighbors sat with me for the afternoon because she was afraid of being alone during a tornado warning. She huddled outside her apartment a few feet from me as she nervously scrolled through her phone for weather updates. I have come to know and appreciate the humanity of my neighbors, and our conversations have transformed from discussions about the weather to thoughts about college choices and where we might find ourselves after the pandemic.

My time in the hallway may have had a deeper impact in terms of my academic future. While I ended up getting a top grade in calculus at my science and math school, I’ve decided upon a new major once I get to college: sociology.

Ilana Drake is a senior at the High School for Math, Science and Engineering in New York City.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

For the previous half hour, I had been thoroughly entertained as my class acted out scenes from “A Streetcar Named Desire.” The comedic attempts at Southern accents provided a welcome break from the day’s nervous anticipation.

But not even a good story lessened the anxiety of high-stakes college admissions.

Despite my youth, I’ve had many sleepless nights. I’m not talking about all-nighters preparing for tests or cramming through last-minute projects, though I’ve had plenty of those. I mean the stress of applying to college, during a pandemic, as a low-income, first-generation American. I would often lie awake at night wondering how I would pay for college, take on as little debt as possible and still make my parents and friends proud.

It seemed like an impossible task.

In my family, it was always a given that I would go to college — the more prestigious, the better. I’m privileged to have parents who highly value education and were able to get college degrees, even if they’re from institutions outside the United States. In first grade, I overheard them talking about college and my father’s struggle to continue his medical training after emigrating from Ghana. As early as elementary school, my parents began to encourage me to focus on college so I could accomplish what they could not — go to graduate school, find a job related to my degree and join an esteemed alumni network.

“You will go to Yale one day and excel,” my dad once told me. For my family, education was the Way Out. It was also a way to set a precedent for my younger siblings, lift my family up from poverty and potentially change their economic trajectory for generations.

I fell in love with Northwestern University in seventh grade. Its top-ranked journalism program, proximity to Chicago and artistic campus fueled a six-year infatuation, peaking with my application to join the Class of 2025 as a QuestBridge Scholar.

QuestBridge is an annual talent search program that offers high-achieving, low-income high school seniors full scholarships to top universities. This year, over 18,000 students applied for just under 1,500 scholarships. I applied in September, learned I was a finalist in late October and finished a mad dash to send financial aid documents and applications to Northwestern and six other prestigious schools by Nov. 1.

Once the Nov. 1 deadline hit, I expected life to slow down. After all, the chaotic sprint was over. If QuestBridge rejected me, I thought, I’d have plenty of time to prepare for regular decision applications in January. But the post-deadline period was agony. I’d been in consistently low spirits since the start of virtual school. Because of my parents’ schedules, the job of homeschooling my younger brothers, ages 6 and 7, largely fell to me. Between mentoring them and sticking to my rigorous academic schedule, I began to lose sleep.

Now I struggled to get out of bed. I worried about hypothetical rejections and acceptances. I missed class due to fatigue and sadness. This led to arguments with my parents. I grew increasingly irritable and resentful at our ongoing family strife. It was not the first time during my academic journey that I felt so alone. But never before had it seemed as if there were no release valve from the constant pressure. The boundary between work and home life blurred. The constant pressures from my parents about the importance of getting a full-ride scholarship became less motivating and more oppressive.

My college counselor reminded me that few people understood what it was like to apply for college as a student from a low-income immigrant family. Luxuries many of my peers take for granted — tutors, therapists, prep classes and emotional support from parents — are all things I went without.

The cost of living in Alexandria, Virginia, my hometown, is than the national average. is $96,733 compared to $61,937 across the United States. For years, I’ve seen my well-funded school district prioritize the voices of white, influential parents with money and lawyers over minority students with legitimate grievances about discrimination. Through , panels, and articles in my school and city newspaper, I spotlighted in the diverse school student body, such as school and the struggles of to integrate into my school. As a young journalist who was often just as affected by the issues I covered as the subjects I interviewed, it was empowering to chip away at the ivory tower my wealthy public school environment constructed.

It’s easy to scoff at the obsession with the Ivy League and other prestigious institutions. But for people like me, the name-brand degree means much more than a way to advance. It’s a chance to defy the odds and thrive in an environment where people like me were not always welcome.

“There is a seat at the table at every one of these schools,” my counselor told me during one of our many college admissions discussions. “And they will gladly welcome the voice of an African-American woman.”

But , a bill completely out of reach for my family of six and its limited income. When I considered this massive expense, I felt stuck, a feeling I knew all too well after two summer months without reliable Wi-Fi. I felt stuck after finishing the first academic quarter on Zoom, not knowing if there would be an end to virtual learning. I felt stuck as I continued helping my brothers get through first and second grade online, worried about their development as young students.

It was exhausting. With my dad’s taxes and an assist from Google, I filled out the financial aid forms myself. I was intimidated by the over 100 questions on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and the over 300 questions on the College Scholarship Service Profile. Despite my desperate need for grants, these lengthy applications made me not want to apply at all. The size and complexity of the task felt daunting. I made several mistakes I had to fix because I had no idea which documents to send.

When QuestBridge decision day finally arrived, I stayed in AP Lit until the end. Then I immediately hopped on another Zoom call with my counselor to view the decision. In one click on our shared screen, the situation I’d been knee-deep in for months suddenly got unstuck.

So please forgive me for burying the lede: I got in! Through Questbridge, I won a full, four-year scholarship to Northwestern.

It was, to say the least, unexpected. I’d gotten used to seeing Northwestern as a pipe-dream, something that would never become reality. Until it did. The bubble of anxiety I’d formed around myself finally burst, and now I would be catapulted into an elite education.

In my quest for the Golden Ticket, I discovered a glaring similarity between college admissions and the pandemic. Both are difficult for everyone, but harder for some students than others. This is something my teachers and administrators got grossly incorrect, basing their academic expectations on the false idea that the pandemic is some sort of great equalizer. But not everyone is “going through the same thing.” Just one example: Some classmates, who kept their Zoom cameras off for fear of exposing their home lives, had been marked absent by their teachers. Despite their best efforts, many teachers simply don’t understand the unique situation of first-generation, low-income students.

I’ve heard many adults in my life say that kids are “putting too much pressure on themselves,” when honestly we just want a decent shot at changing our futures. As over-hyped as people think they are, . Our elders often describe college as something that opens doors, and I count myself extremely fortunate to be passing through one of them. For too many people in my position, however, the reality is a door slammed in their faces.

Years of public schooling instilled in me a staunch belief in meritocracy — that hard work would get me whatever I wanted. But living through the pandemic in the shadow of my affluent town taught me that hard work isn’t always enough. Some have more obstacles than others that keep them from achieving their goals.

I tearfully celebrated my Northwestern acceptance with friends from my school paper. That night was the first one in years in which I slept peacefully without stress.

It wasn’t until I began withdrawing all of my other college applications that the finality of it all set in. “It is done!” my counselor proclaimed contentedly at the end of our Zoom meeting. My college admissions process was over. I’d come out the other side in a triumph I once believed to be impossible.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

Bridgette Adu-Wadier is a senior at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia. She is an editor for her award-winning school newspaper, Theogony, and a freelance reporter for The Alexandria Gazette. 

This was the least nervous I’d ever been for a first day of school. No harried backpack repacking when the longest trip I’ll be making is from my bed to my desk. No frantic outfit selection when all my peers will see are the seven or so pixels composing my shirt on Zoom. I wasn’t totally unruffled: There was a good deal of unnecessary reorganizing going on in my room at 11 p.m. Still, I went to bed filled with a surprising sense of calm.

In some ways, I enjoyed my unanticipated tranquility. And part of my serenity was undoubtedly attributable to my new status as a high school senior — with 11 years of first days under my belt, it’s no surprise that some of the anxiety has worn off.

Still, I think my feelings, or lack thereof, about the return to virtual school speak to the broader sense of loss students are experiencing: perhaps less a sense of calm than one of dull disappointment. My school decided to start the semester entirely online, with plans to re-evaluate . This was a wise decision given Kentucky’s in coronavirus cases, and one that’s allowing me to avert the anxiety experienced by so many students facing elsewhere in the country. But those of us fortunate enough to not have to worry about contracting COVID-19 in crowded school buildings are facing an entirely different set of challenges.

The things that always make me nervous on the first day of school — meeting new teachers, reconnecting with old friends — are part and parcel of the things that bring me joy and excitement for the other 170 or so days of the school year. I was less excited to reconnect with my friends when I knew our conversations would be mediated by a computer screen, absent the privacy and intimacy of in-person communication. I was less worried about making a good first impression on my teachers when I couldn’t meet them face-to-face. I lost that sense of renewed structure and schedule effected by the return to a physical building, a feeling that can put butterflies in my summer-accustomed stomach but that also provides a sense of constancy for nine months of the year. I lost the unstructured moments, hanging out in teachers’ classrooms during lunch and chatting with friends in the library, that feel just as critical to the school day as actual instructional time. Going back to school simply didn’t feel like much of a meaningful shift after a similarly Zoom-filled and homebound summer.

There are advantages to the virtual format, to be sure. I’ll be avoiding the perennially disgusting bathrooms that are a prerequisite for any building occupied by so many adolescents. I can head outside and breathe in the fresh air between classes rather than weave my way through jam-packed hallways that somehow manage to contain around two thousand students. Best of all, I’m getting an extra 45 minutes of sleep without the need to pack my lunch and drive across town every morning.

But I think we all know that for most students, these limited benefits aren’t a replacement for the opportunities in-person schooling provides. While online instruction is certainly necessary to protect the health and safety of students and staff, it’s indubitably the less-popular option under regular conditions.

It’s simply more difficult to make a virtual classroom engaging than a brick-and-mortar one. People of all ages are realizing just how real Zoom fatigue can be. One recent study from Kentucky’s Prichard Committee Student Voice Team, of which I am a member, found that felt less engaged in their learning after the start of the pandemic. Online learning also provides fewer opportunities for the social interaction that’s deeply embedded in the typical school day, leaving many students feeling more isolated.

And none of that comes close to the additional difficulties faced by the students without stable internet connections or access to technology, the students who can’t attend synchronous classes because of familial or employment obligations, and the students who rely on their schools for healthy meals or mental health services.

Still, my school, at least, is giving me reason to be hopeful. Despite the unexpected and undoubtedly challenging circumstances, the teachers and administrators of in Lexington, Kentucky, are making a laudable effort to keep students engaged and upbeat, to provide not just a traditional learning experience but also the social education and connection schools regularly provide.

As I moved from class to class (or Zoom link to Zoom link) today, several moments made me smile. Many teachers adorned their Canvas pages with virtual Bitmoji classrooms, their avatars guiding students to important links and decorating class calendars. Others got distracted from their syllabi and embarked on rambling digressions, reminding me of the fascinating tangents I’ve loved in years past. In short, my teachers’ personalities managed to come through the small box they occupied on my laptop, reassuring me that even without the possibility of face-to-face interaction, I’ll still be able to make meaningful connections.

Even the structure of the school day had a reassuring familiarity to it. Small instances of continuity were helpful: My school is keeping its five-minute class breaks, the need to run across the building replaced with the desire for a pause from staring at screens. Despite some changes to the schedule, my administration retained the A/B block schedule I’ve become accustomed to, whereby students take an alternating set of four classes instead of having the same agenda each day. And lunch was an especially pleasant reminder of the possibilities of a virtual format, when my friends and I set up (this time on Instagram rather than Canvas) yet another Zoom call, chatting from seven different kitchens.

As the weeks progress, we’ll see what instruction looks like beyond the syllabus discussions and introductory activities that have always filled the first days of school. But now I’m less nervous in a different sense than I was before. In the lead-up to our first day, I experienced a startling lack of anxiety. Now, I’m feeling a bolstered assurance that virtual instruction will work out somehow, as we eagerly await a time when we can safely see each other in the hallways again.

For as long as I can remember, I was a bird trapped in a golden cage. On the outside, my world was a glittering array of debate trophies, academic titles, college scholarships and a picture-perfect family.

But no one knew the fractured portrait that was my abusive household.

One of my earliest memories: I’m 5 years old, attending a birthday party for the daughter of a family friend. I made the mistake of playing dolls in the house rather than staying outside per my father’s orders. He dragged me back home, screaming the whole way and, as punishment, locked me in my bedroom with the lights off. I was so scared that I tried talking to imaginary friends for comfort, but my dad heard and yelled at me to “shut up and be quiet.”

I have other memories: sleepless nights of screaming, hiding in closets, broken board games, muffled sobs, being chased up the stairs and dodging swings to the head.

, I was shocked to learn that very little has been written about the actual lived experience of children and young people facing this trauma during the pandemic. As of this year, have reported being victims of domestic abuse.

I recently decided that the only way to pierce the silence on this issue is to speak up.

This is my story.

I am 18 years old, and I just started my first year of college. I have high-functioning autism. For 10 years, I have suffered from chronic depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

COVID-19 stripped me of my support system. When quarantine began in March, I was no longer able to go to school or travel out of state for speech and debate competitions. My school’s program was a safe haven, where for occasional weekends, I could escape my parents’ abuse and simply be good enough.

The lockdown meant I would be stuck at home with my parents. My mother is an essential worker, so the majority of my days were spent inside with my dad, who retired in 2016. I already had deep issues with my father, and having him as my main source of social interaction didn’t help.

In essence, my home life was a ticking time bomb.

Still, part of me hoped this would be an opportunity to heal old wounds and get to know my father better without angering him. This meant listening to my mother.

For months, she’d been trying to fix my chronic depression with a grab bag of homeopathic doctors she found online. Since middle school, I’ve suffered with the condition as a result of various traumas and lack of proper treatment.

My mother doesn’t believe in antidepressants and thinks that therapy alone will cure my woes. My father, on the other hand, reacts to the slightest breakdown or hard moment by threatening to send me to a mental hospital and pile me up with hardcore antidepressants.

I learned it was better to keep my mouth shut and take whatever pills my mother gave me. This time, she ordered a package of vitamins and “natural amino acids,” complete with an appointment with an online “therapist.” The therapist was pushy, and the explanation for the “emergency pill procedure” should I have an “adverse” reaction didn’t sit well.

Halfway through the appointment, I hung up.

Immediately, I turned to research, a coping mechanism built out of my passion for speech and debate. I showed my mother that she’d sent me to a fraudulent, non-FDA-approved company.

Despite my increasingly desperate pleas, she refused to listen. My dad began yelling, demanding that I never raise my voice to a parent.

For the first time in 17 years, I spoke back. I told him I didn’t understand how I was expected to act civilly when he had never shown me an ounce of civility all the time he had raised me. I recounted instances of abuse — being locked in dark rooms, threats of violence, drunken rages.

I asked him why he did it, why he tormented me for years and why I had convinced myself I was a disgrace to him. His answer: I deserved it.

I spiraled into a panic attack, which my father mocked. It felt akin to an out-of-body experience. For so long, my mother had told me that my father couldn’t apologize to me because he was “ridden with guilt.” But I now told myself that was all a lie. My suffering, the years of self-doubt and loneliness, was all my fault.

I don’t remember much besides running. I ran out the back door and through my neighborhood. Uber wasn’t readily available due to the pandemic, so I hid behind a tree while my mother called for me and I prayed my ride would arrive before she found me. Eventually, the car came and took me to a friend’s house.

When I got there, I immediately collapsed in the arms of my friends, wailing loudly in the driveway. My support group knew what I was going through. A month or two prior, we had created a safety plan. Should any of our parents trigger a crisis, we agreed to call someone in the group and hide out at their house for a couple of days, weeks if necessary.

For a bunch of LGBTQ+ and disabled kids, it felt essential to have a plan like this.

For 10 days, I stayed at my friend’s house, receiving occasional calls from my mother and a lone apology text from my father. I didn’t know how to react.

In the days that followed, I ate whatever and slept most of the time, pretending to laugh and get along with my friend’s family, only to cry when I was by myself again.

I would lie in bed, plagued by nightmares of my father, nightmares where I would relive our confrontation and past abuse: threats of physical assault and disownment and a litany of reasons why I was the parasite of the family.

Hunkering down without a home to call your own during a pandemic is a kind of torture. Although I had my friends, I never quite felt at home. My friend’s family was more than welcoming, allowing me as much time as I needed to recover. But I never escaped the emptiness that nagged at me, especially when I saw all of them together as a family.

I felt as if I had no mother or father, and that I’d left my little brother behind, trapped in the situation I’d fled. My brother, further on the autism spectrum than I, is also a victim of abuse. The guilt of leaving him ate me alive. I felt like a physical and financial burden to my friend’s family, an emotional burden to my parents and a spiritual burden to myself.

I needed to face the situation, but the pandemic made it nearly impossible to access mental health support. My therapist had almost no availability. I didn’t know whether to call Child Protective Services or find an abuse shelter; I wasn’t sure they were still open, let alone that they could help me.

You see, my father is a former police officer, and he would always threaten me that if I called Child Protective Services, they would turn me away. Even though a social worker told me in a hospital evaluation that I was a domestic abuse victim, all she could do was send me to the psych ward. Furthermore, my family has money and my mother is a great talker. Add those together and my story of domestic abuse can easily be spun into that of a spoiled child hating her gracious parents.

The days I spent with my friend were safe and secure, but I knew deep down that the situation wouldn’t last. My mom would inevitably talk to my friend’s parents. She would prepare for my return. And she would come take me home.

I returned home after my father agreed to stay at the family’s vacation house several hours away. Still, my mother continued to remind me that this arrangement was my fault and that I’d be expected to see him again.

My parents have never apologized for the abuse. My mom just talks about the “mistakes” they made along the way. Whether it’s gaslighting or just me being in my head, nothing hurts more than hearing my mom say that.

It may sound funny, but sometimes I have a hard time viewing myself as abused. Society tells us that unless you’re severely beaten, you’re not abused, just sensitive or “making things up.” Often, when perpetrators are wealthy and respected, victims doubt their feelings and blame themselves. But if there is anything I want people to take away from reading this, it’s that abuse takes many forms. You are not at fault for what others do to you. No abuse is justified.

Time has passed, and my recovery is gradual. I spent my summer alternating from living with my mom to staying with relatives and friends. It hasn’t been the easiest, but scenarios like these never are. In some ways, I’m thankful. The events that followed the night I ran away pushed me to grow up in ways I didn’t think I could.

I opened a checking account, started driving, got some internships and virtual jobs. I can’t say everything is great, but it is better. I’m much more stable and have a phenomenal therapist I can confide in.

Last week, I started my first year of college, and for the first time in forever, I have hope. Being on campus and taking online classes isn’t as isolating as I feared. Within my first week, I made countless friendships, where I can be myself and not be belittled for what I might say or do. Instead of constantly having to prove myself in order to buy small increments of affection, I can have it just for, well, being me.

I was recruited for my college’s speech team. The fact that I can laugh freely again and feel confident is magical. Yet it all makes me question if any of it is actually real and whether one day it will abruptly come to an end.

Around my third day at school, I broke down crying. Tears flowed as I talked to an old friend of mine — also on the speech team — about my experience. In that moment, I realized the gravity of my pain and trauma. I cried, not out of sadness, but because it felt like it was finally over.

I honestly can’t remember the last time when I was genuinely happy. I’m starting to realize, both through my new friends at college and the old ones who helped me get through this period, that family isn’t something you’re born with. It is something you choose on your own.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

During the pandemic, amid loud debates about COVID-related learning loss, the angst over whether to reopen or not to reopen, and the outrage over the latest Trumpian tweetstorm, it was sometimes easy to miss a quieter story: students grappling with the most disorienting semester of their lives.

To give voice to these experiences, The 74 created “Pandemic Notebook,” our ongoing look at students living and learning during the coronavirus, told in their own words.

The authors range from a third-grader lamenting the “worst summer break ever” to a graduating college senior offering a lighthearted look at how internet memes bring us together. Many of the writers graduated from high school this year, part of a generation bookended by the twin tragedies of 9/11 and COVID-19.

For all of these students, the pandemic was akin to hitting the snooze bar on normal.

Their semester was about much more than adjusting to the frustrating dynamics of remote learning. There was fear — fear for parents working on the front lines in doctors’ offices and restaurants, fear of not being able to stay grounded without in-person contact with mentors and friends. And there was loss, too. Not just graduation ceremonies turned awkwardly virtual, but canceled proms and final seasons of lacrosse and baseball cut short. Some turned on to a new world of Netflix-dominated downtime (does anyone remember Joe Exotic?); others tuned out, rediscovering the joys of reading or learning in the outdoors. Many others found themselves exiled from the virtual world, divided from their peers due to the cold economics of bandwidth.

Here are their stories:

Part staycation, part home detention

Just 11 days after her high school in Lexington, Kentucky, closed in March, Sadie Bograd laid out the dimensions of the new normal. “I’m conflicted,” she wrote. “Of course, I’m concerned for the health of my family and community. But as self-absorbed as it feels to say it, I’m also worried about not being able to go to prom.” She described life in quarantine as part staycation, part home detention — though like many at the time, she only expected it to last five weeks.

She dug into the ever-growing pile of novels and memoirs on her bedside table and binge-watched the latest seasons of The Good Place and On My Block. “But sometimes,” she acknowledged, “the prospect of an unstructured month incites an overwhelming sense of panic.”

Read Sadie’s story here.

Just 80 miles away in Louisville, Sky Carroll described how the speed with which COVID-19 went from threat to reality caught her and her friends off guard. “We might not finish our game of senior soakers,” wrote the recently graduated senior. “There might not be a prom or class trip. Maybe not even graduation.” She lamented the loss of her final season of lacrosse, a sport she said “helped me grow physically and mentally” and is, “because of the connections I’ve made, the only place I feel I can be my authentic self.”

“I know this all may sound trivial, and it is,” she wrote. “I joke with my friends about ‘the rona’ and laugh about the possibility of a virtual graduation ceremony. But the truth is, I’m scared.”

Read Sky’s story here.

Fear and isolation

For some students facing the pandemic, the stakes are existential. Rainer Harris, a junior at a New York City Catholic school, worried about losing his “resilient and very stubborn” mom. They’ve always been “very close,” he said. For instance, in the seventh grade, when kids at school called him the n-word, she told Rainer to be proud of it and that their words would only affect him as long he let them.

But in late May, she returned to her job as the practice manager of a pediatrician’s office in Manhattan. The job is high-risk: She engages face-to-face with dozens of sick patients a day, including drawing blood and collecting urine samples. But she is also 55 and Black, putting her at a much higher risk of exposure. “There is cause for me to worry about her safety,” he wrote.

Read Rainer’s story here.

Like many young people across the nation, Emily Bach saw her relationships, routines and responsibilities upended by the virus. For instance, there’s the history teacher she used to meet on Tuesday mornings to check in before class. Most days, they’d make jokes about their school’s poorly scheduled construction or failing sports teams, but on some, the graduated high school senior wrote, “his was the only smile I saw all day.” Attending school, going to club meetings and taking calls all made “the bad days feel more normal.”

For Emily and many of her friends, the pandemic underscored “the crushing impact of isolation on mental health.” A gay sexual assault survivor, Emily found that during the pandemic she became a sounding board for many of her suffering friends. “The comfort and familiarity of my day-to-day life were replaced by the fear and tragedy of watching my friends get sick, both mentally and physically,” she wrote.

Read Emily’s story here.

Both sides of the digital divide

Is it possible that just four months ago a world existed where many people had never heard of Zoom? In March, Hope Li walked readers through her awkward, glitchy and often hilarious first day of remote learning at Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, California. “It felt like the first day of school all over again,” she wrote. “The night before, I couldn’t get to sleep.”

It was a day of breathing exercises, barking dogs and weird email messages from school with meant-to-be-inspirational quotes from the likes of Eckhart Tolle. “While some of the kinks have been worked out since that first day,” she wrote, “it’s only the beginning of a long experiment in this brave new world of remote learning.”

Read Hope’s story here.

Across the country and on the other side of the nation’s digital divide, Brandon Yam struggled for weeks to get an iPad from the nation’s largest school system. His 10-year-old Sony laptop, “glitchy from excessive use,” was the only computer available for a family of 9, wrote the junior at Francis Lewis High School in New York City.

For Yam, this is what distance learning looked like: pinching “the corners of my iPhone 6 screen wide, squinting to see my trigonometry and physics teachers doing practice problems on paper. Even so, my parents still bicker in the background of my Zoom meetings. I double- or triple-check whether my microphone is off to refrain from giving away too much of my home life to teachers and classmates.”

As someone who attends an elite public school and has two working parents, Yam recognizes his privilege amid the struggle. “Still,” he wrote. “it shouldn’t have taken two weeks to get a laptop, and it shouldn’t have been so hard to get simple answers from the district.”

Read Brandon’s story here.

The pros and cons of Netflix

Life in quarantine also introduced new concepts of fun. The pandemic didn’t invent Netflix binging, of course. But in a world where gathering in public was still dangerous, it became nearly ubiquitous. Asher Lehrer-Small, recently graduated from Brown University, seized upon the ways that “the virus puts many of us in the same boat. We’re stuck inside, bored, and unsure of what the future may hold.”

While he previously avoided social media, Asher wrote, digital connectivity now offered an “unexpected solace.” He laughed about the memes spawned from Netflix’s Tiger King and Cardi B’s Instagram transmissions. “Though absolutely no one is glad for the circumstances, our country has never had so much shared content to connect us,” he wrote.

Read Asher’s story here.

Faced with the same reality, Talia Natterson went in the opposite direction: She shunned television and daily Facetime calls with friends and rediscovered the joys of reading. “I longed for an escape from this new reality of the world around me and my isolation at home,” wrote the sophomore at a Los Angeles private school. “I dreamed of utopias and alternate universes in which coronavirus had never infected people.”

She laughed at Lady Susan’s flirtatious behavior and shuddered at the demise of Dorian Gray. Through these characters and their fictionalized worlds, she imagined a better future. “I am shocked by how unappealing technology has become for me during this ‘corona-cation,’” she wrote.

Read Talia’s story here.

Siblings, mentors

Some students had very little time for play. With parents working outside the home or lacking fluency in English, these students took on the roles of teachers and mentors to younger siblings. Bridgette Adu-Wadier, a junior from Alexandria, Virginia, is the daughter of émigrés from Ghana. As the first in her family with plans to go to college, she is on an ambitious trajectory, even during the pandemic. Last semester, she took five AP courses, with calculus Zoom meetings outside of regular school hours and essays due Sunday at midnight. But she is also responsible for teaching and caring for her young brothers. “We rarely have 20 minutes of uninterrupted peace,” she wrote.

The new reality left little dividing line between school and family obligations. “Online learning feels like more work than regular school because I am no longer doing assignments in isolation; homework and video calls drop in the middle of real life, which is much more exhausting,” Bridgette wrote. “At school, I’m divorced from my family obligations; at home during a Zoom call, people constantly enter and exit my room, and my brothers inevitably burst in and distract me.”

Read Bridgette’s story here.

Safiya Al-Samarrai comes from a family of refugees and recent immigrants from the ancient city of Samarra in Iraq. A first-year college student studying nursing at Middlesex Community College in Lowell, Massachusetts, she also has many responsibilities at home. She helps translate appointments and pays the bills. “And I’m now buying most of the groceries because I’m scared to let my mom and dad leave the house,” she wrote.

In addition to her parents, she lives with her brothers and 9-year-old autistic nephew, who goes by his nickname Nemo. “The first weeks after our city’s schools closed, Nemo spent every day watching Pokémon,” she wrote. “It upset me that he wasn’t learning. My mom suggested that I try teaching him.”

Read Safiya’s story here.

Loss

The nation’s first COVID semester was also a time of missed milestones and lost opportunities. Steven Rissotto, a recently graduated high school senior in San Francisco, remembers the night the lights went out on his baseball career. On March 5, Steven was scheduled to relief pitch for his school team. Night games were rare, making them “adored and enjoyed by parents, coaches and players,” he wrote. The mood was festive, highlighted by food and drink. But then the news leaked that the parent of a student at school was diagnosed with the coronavirus, and Steven and his teammates were benched.

It was a tough pill to swallow for Steven, who “fell in love with baseball in third grade and never looked back.” “I love baseball because anything can happen,” he wrote. “The best team could destroy the worst team one day, and it could be the other way around the next. It reminds me about the reality of our current moment.”

Read Steven’s story here.

As with many students, Sunaya DasGupta Mueller’s academic life from March to June was a litany of sitting in front of her computer for seven hours a day, going in and out of Zoom video classes. For the New Jersey sophomore, the world of largely virtual learning sparked daydreams of a lost childhood. From kindergarten through third grade, she wrote, she attended a nature-based school “where I learned math by knitting, read English books in trees and fed goats in science class. We were discouraged from sitting in classrooms, or having any screen time, even at home. Instead, we painted with abandon, wrote and performed our own plays, and built fairy houses out of acorns in the field.”

During the pandemic, the practice of social distancing helped her realize that active engagement in a learning community is one of the most important aspects of an education. Looking back on her younger years, she wrote that “physical activity, whether doing lab experiments in science, shooting videos for art or solving math problems on a whiteboard, helps make learning real.”

Read Sunaya’s story here.

Most summers, Owain Williams, a third-grader in Washington, D.C., would spend time with his family playing in the city’s splash parks and playgrounds, celebrating birthdays and going on trips. “Now, because of the pandemic, all of that is gone,” he wrote.

A month away from summer break, he predicted weeks without fun. “I think that by then, it won’t feel like summer break,” Owain wrote. “It’ll feel like quarantine, because we’ve been home since March.”

Read Owain’s story here.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

Her job entails engaging face-to-face with dozens of sick patients a day, including drawing blood and collecting urine samples. This puts her at a just based on the nature of her work. When you couple this with her race and age, there is cause for me to worry about her safety. I’ve been dealing with the added anxiety largely by reading (I’ve returned to the Percy Jackson series for pure escapism), journaling, and leaning on my friends more than ever through FaceTime, Zoom and text.

I’m very close with my mother and always feel comfortable telling her how I feel. When I was in the seventh grade and kids at my school called me the n-word, she told me to be proud of it and that their words would only affect me as long as I let them.

But she never shows her personal worries to me, and she always goes the extra mile to make me and the rest of the family feel comfortable. When she comes home every night, no matter how tired she is, she makes us authentic Jamaican food: plantains, ackee, rice and peas. It helps connect us to our roots.

We live in South Ozone Park in Queens, a suburban, middle-class and largely African-American neighborhood. My father, who does administrative work at a Midtown financial company from home, is doing the yard enhancement he has never had the time for in the past. My brother, a healthcare lawyer at a Manhattan firm, also lives at home, where he dedicates his time to legal work such as writing and handling contracts. (My sister, a rising senior at Yale, remains at her apartment in New Haven.)

My mother? She’s always been resilient and very stubborn, something that fills me with admiration and also frustration. I told her that I’m worried that she will contract coronavirus and have to be quarantined away from home for a while. She assured me that isn’t going to happen, and if it did, we could still be connected, even if it means making daily video calls. She understands my worries and usually responds by telling me about her duty as a front-line worker and how proud she is and how she will be sure to stay safe.

Despite the comfort I may feel in those moments, the statistics offer cause for concern. show that despite making up 22 percent of the population, Black people account for 28 percent of COVID-19 fatalities in the state. were largely expected, but the numbers are still disconcerting. New results from the nationally dying at more than twice the rate of white people. More than 20,000 Black people — about 1 in every 2,000 — have died from the disease. While Blacks had a fatality rate of 50.3 per 100,000 people, whites had a fatality rate of 20.7 per 100,000.

My friends have been reaching out to me because they know my family and I are at increased risk. They ask me simple things out of the blue, like “How are you?” and “Is your family OK?” It’s simple gestures like this that remind me how lucky I am to have the people around me that I do. The stark statistical disparities, however, come as no surprise to me. They are the result of years of systemic inequalities in our , prominently brought to the public’s attention by the published the year I was born. Since then, these disparities have been acknowledged but largely unaddressed.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the most visible leaders in the fight against COVID-19, that “health disparities have always existed for the African-American community” and that this crisis is just “shining a bright light on how unacceptable that is.” While his recognition of this fact is great, the stark racial breakdown in the coronavirus death toll demonstrates that not enough has been done to fix these disparities.

from the New York Department of Health show that 9.6 percent of the coronavirus fatalities in the state were people in the 50-59 age range, which my mother falls in, accounting for more than 2,000 deaths. While the gravity of this crisis is a reality for families like mine, many young people glamorize breaking social distancing guidelines because they feel it is so critical to see their friends. I see Snapchat stories and Instagram posts with captions like “Fuck quarantine” that make it seem as if just because some people are bored of coronavirus, it’s over now.

In the same vein, have taken to the streets to protest the lockdowns. These protests make me very angry. For some people, it seems, economic prosperity is more important than public health. They’re disregarding the fact that there is an entire group of people in this country disproportionately harmed by their actions.

More than 70 percent of New York state . Although the city is just beginning to open back up to certain types of businesses, movement in and around it will likely spread the virus. I am happy for the state that the reopening process has begun, but it still doesn’t mitigate the anxiety I feel for my mother.

Before school finished Friday, I’d wake up at 7:30 a.m. to log on to Zoom for my classes and would barely have time to say goodbye to my mother before my father drove her to work. I tried to focus on school, even with distractions like television and video game systems two feet away. With summer and the promise of continued lockdown, the job of staying grounded is made harder when each day, I don’t know if I’ll get a call from my mother saying she has to self-quarantine and might not come home for weeks.

Rainier Harris is a junior at Regis High School, a Catholic school in New York City. 

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

“Can you get me a book to read?”

“When do I get to take the bus to school again?”

“What’s a coronavirus?”

When I first learned I wouldn’t be returning to school to complete the year, I immediately felt defeated and overwhelmed. The coronavirus has not brought any hospitalizations or untimely deaths to my family. But there has been increased stress, dashed plans and little quiet.

Along with my 12-year-old sister and parents, I have to homeschool my younger brothers for the next two months and figure out a way to keep them engaged through August, since local summer programs will likely be canceled.

We rarely have 20 minutes of uninterrupted peace.

On the last day of “regular” school, my brothers came home with three packets of work and reading logs. They’ve been working their way through them while watching interactive videos sent by their teachers. At 5 and 7 years old, they’ve learned to navigate Zoom with few problems.

But they are still struggling to grasp that school is something they have to do every day, even without their teachers’ direction. At home, they play loudly, watch Nickelodeon, make messes of their meals and get into several screaming fits a day. Their hyperactivity is endless, and so is their ability to squabble over stolen toy cars and spilled juice. Countless times throughout the day, my brothers burst into the room I share with my sister, hurling accusations.

“He scratched me!”

“He hit me first! He started it!”

“I’m not your friend anymore. I’m telling on you!”

Then one or both of them dissolves into tears. Before the pandemic, I had never seen so much animosity between my brothers. But I know it’s more than them being little boys. They aren’t used to being at home all the time and interacting with each other so much; it’s making them a bit restless.

The situation offers my sister and me an opportunity to teach them conflict resolution. We lose our patience often and yell at them sometimes, but we try our best.

“Don’t pick fights, both of you,” I tell them. “When someone makes you upset, don’t hit or scratch them back. You don’t want to be angry and sad during this time. Let’s do something fun that won’t make you upset.” I try to get them to focus their energy on positive activities like reading, drawing and playing quietly.

Because of my parents’ schedules, the job of teaching my brothers typically falls to me. My dad works remotely from home. My mom spends most of the day cooking, doing laundry and housekeeping. In the mornings, she gathers food for the family from distribution locations in the city where I live, near Washington, D.C.

A few weeks before I was born, my parents immigrated to the U.S. from Ghana in search of a better life. I will be the first in my family to attend college in America. Despite my determination, I at times feel frustrated. Prior to the pandemic, I was usually able to surmount the obstacles that often accompany having immigrant parents who don’t know the U.S. education system. They understand that it’s important to get good grades. But they don’t know what a GPA is or how to navigate college admissions and scholarships. They also don’t grasp that admission to American universities isn’t based solely on academics.

I’m used to being able to find a way, despite my parents’ lack of understanding. I’m used to being in control of my academic pursuits. I plan in advance. I try to register for tests and office hours; I meet with my counselor to soak up all the free advice. But with the pandemic, stay-at-home orders and SAT cancellations, very little is currently under my control.

I look to next year’s college applications with dread. Months ago, I saw myself done with standardized testing, traveling across the country for the first time and speaking at journalism conferences on the importance of youth media. Now homebound, I stress over SAT cancellations and online AP exams.

I’ve watched friends grow disappointed when internship opportunities fell apart. NPR recently that it had canceled its summer internships — somber news for my hopeful friend on a gap year who was awaiting a response.

This past month has been especially chaotic. According to the , teachers aren’t supposed to assign any new content or offer grades for the third quarter. During the closure, we’re only supposed to get optional review assignments on material we’ve already been learning. But since I’m taking five AP courses, I’ve been getting both new assignments and review material that piles up within hours. AP teachers have a lot more leeway to give assignments to students preparing for exams.

I’ve had calculus Zoom meetings outside of regular school hours and essays due on Sunday by 11:59 p.m. Trying to understand AP Physics problems online just isn’t the same, and I worry about failing the now 45-minute exam. Physics is very hands-on and application-based; the virtual labs are no substitute for in-person experiments. Online physics is much more dull and difficult, something I wouldn’t have dreamed possible before the pandemic.

At home, I never truly feel like school is over. I could be eating a meal or reading a book when I am jolted by notifications from teachers about missing assignments. In the middle of cleaning up after my brothers, I remember Zoom meetings I didn’t put on my calendar.

Online learning feels like more work than regular school because I am no longer doing assignments in isolation; homework and video calls drop in the middle of real life, which is much more exhausting. At school, I’m divorced from my family obligations; at home during a Zoom call, people constantly enter and exit my room, and my brothers inevitably burst in and distract me.

I work on my schoolwork late into the evening, usually past midnight. Like many other students, my sleep schedule has been derailed.

I’ve heard from friends who are only children about how lonely and isolated they feel. That makes me feel lucky, even in my loud and turbulent home. At times, I relax by making illustrations and practicing hand lettering. I also journal when I can.

I haven’t achieved any structure or order to my days; they are as disorganized and erratic as my thoughts. But I do try to approach this with the same mindset I’ve had since the first day of school — that is, taking things day by day.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

Bridgette Adu-Wadier is a junior at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia. She is an editor for her award-winning school newspaper, , and a freelance reporter for . 

I set my alarm for 5:50 a.m., Monday, March 20 — 10 minutes before the city’s tech department opened. I quickly typed in their number, put my phone on speaker and waited. And waited. I was on hold for an hour until I couldn’t take it anymore and hung up.

My first day of remote learning at Francis Lewis High School in New York City had begun.

Still, the largest public school system in the country couldn’t take my call, fix my problems or hear me out. It was like speaking into a void.

On March 15, Mayor Bill de Blasio responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by shutting down New York City’s public schools until April 20 — and has since proposed for the rest of the school year. The day of the mayor’s announcement, the screen on my 10-year-old Sony laptop flickered on and off, glitchy from excessive use. A notification of a popped up, informing us that we needed to fill out a form to get one of the available for students across the city who lack access to broadband. So I sat my parents down and translated the message into their native Cantonese.

Filling out the form took 15 minutes — not because of the form’s length, but because of the speed of our laptop, connected to nothing but a broken charger and weak Wi-Fi.

I wanted to make sure our form didn’t get lost in the district’s vast bureaucracy. With each call to the education department, a stern voice emerged putting me on hold for an hour, only to inform me after my 14th attempt that week that they had no answers — that they could only help us fill out the form.

“Sorry, sir,” the provider said. “I can’t help you with that. If I could, I would. But I can’t.”

“No, it’s all right,” I said, my voice breaking.

“Why’s this so hard?” my mom asked, crying.

I gave her a tissue, squeezing her shoulder. “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

She gestured to the faint screen. It cast some light into the dark corner of our living room, where the blinds were drawn — my mom likes it like that in the morning. “All we want is one iPad,” she said. “We shouldn’t have to do this.”

Gov. Andrew Cuomo mandated that nonessential workers stay home, but my dad is a chef at a Chinese restaurant in Flushing, where the number of coronavirus cases is , and my mom works at the same post office where .

They feed seven mouths: my grandmother, my five siblings and myself. That arrangement is somewhat unusual. My siblings and I are two sets of triplets: three sisters, six years older than me, and my two brothers and myself, all age 17 and preparing to apply to college next year. Because of the financial toll my sisters, who graduated from college last year, took on my parents, my brothers and I worry about getting enough federal financial aid. My parents paid for my sisters’ room, board and tuition, and they have shelved their retirement plans now that my brothers and I are on the same trajectory. My eldest sister has taken out more than $40,000 in loans for her master’s, and my two other sisters have been laid off from work (as education and career counselors) due to the virus.

I know my parents. They’re resilient. They emigrated from Hong Kong over 40 years ago, when they were my age, and made something of themselves. They’ve raised six children and are putting all of them through college. But their hard work won’t protect them from the virus. They’re on the front lines of getting it.

I’m scared they’re not going to make it. I’m afraid they’re going to die working, that we’ll be evicted and end up living out on the streets. They hide their fear of spreading anything from work to us with hugs, kisses and smiles — dangerous though such actions may be in this strange time. They didn’t explicitly say I shouldn’t worry, that I should focus on attending Zoom meetings on my phone, studying for the SATs and applying for summer programs after my junior year.

But I worried that we wouldn’t get a device. And for weeks, we didn’t.

Distribution has been a for hundreds of thousands of students like me across the city who couldn’t get a device in the first two weeks of remote learning, Chancellor Richard Carranza said, primarily because priority was given to students with circumstances more dire than mine — homeless students, for example. To me, this cold economic calculation had the effect of shrinking me down, smaller than I already was, in the dark corner of my living room, my life.

For two weeks, my siblings and I butted heads to get to the router at the center of our living room for a bar of internet connection. Whichever of my brothers, usually the eldest, arrived there first, got the laptop. The rest of us — my sisters, my younger brother and me — wound up using our phones for homework and leisure. I often pinched the corners of my iPhone 6 screen wide, squinting to see my trigonometry and physics teachers doing practice problems on paper.

Even so, my parents still bicker in the background of my Zoom meetings. I double- or triple-check whether my microphone is off to refrain from giving away too much of my home life to teachers and classmates. My next-door neighbor’s dogs yap at sunrise when we’re trying to sleep. I blankly stare at them through my window until they stop.

But somehow, we’re making do. While internet access issues have distanced me from my education, I feel surprisingly OK about it. I’d rather have butting heads, bickering parents and yapping dogs than no education at all. And I did end up getting a device on Sunday, April 5 — two weeks after distance learning started in New York City and just as the give-and-take of Zoom and Google Classroom started to feel normal.

My story, unfortunately, is a common one for New York City public school students of color from low-income backgrounds. As many as in my Flushing neighborhood lack access to broadband. This is a cycle that keeps poor communities poor. I know because I’m living it.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m luckier than a lot of my peers whose zip code determines their level of learning. I attend one of the most selective and applied-to public high schools in New York City. Since elementary school, I’ve recognized that my education was a privilege. After all, I live in a house with two working parents, multiple phones and one laptop. My three sisters have all gone to college. So will my brothers and I.

Not every student has it so easy. Still, it shouldn’t have taken two weeks to get a laptop, and it shouldn’t have been so hard to get simple answers from the district. Now, I sit here wondering how many other children have had to act on their own with parents at work — playing the roles of traffic cop, translator and support system, trying to find light in the dark corners of our education system.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

Oh, and back in March, when all students were sent home from school, I realized I did not know how to teach my third-grade nephew.

I’m juggling a lot. My college classes are all on Zoom. Teachers have seemed to expect us to complete more and more assignments each week. Perhaps they are under more pressure to make sure that we are learning, and that concern translates into additional assignments. Besides that, I have many responsibilities at home. I help translate appointments and pay bills, and I’m now buying most of the groceries because I’m scared to let my mom and dad leave the house.

I live with my parents, my brothers and my 9-year-old nephew, who goes by his nickname Nemo. Nemo loves animals, building Legos and watching Pokémon. Last year, he was diagnosed with autism. At school, he is in a special ed class and has a one-on-one teaching aid. But since the “stay at home” advisory, it’s just me and him.

The first weeks after our city’s schools closed, Nemo spent every day watching Pokémon. It upset me that he wasn’t learning. My mom suggested that I try teaching him. We are refugees and recent immigrants. I have the strongest English in the family, but I had no idea how to be a teacher. When I was 9, I was still living in the ancient city of Samarra in Iraq. Third grade for me was the first year I started learning English.

For help, I reached out to my former high school social studies teacher. She sent me links to math videos, education websites and reading programs. I came up with a class schedule.

My nephew was confused when I told him I would be his teacher. “Can I have the weekend free?” he asked, a little worried. “Yes!” I promised. “But are you going to be my teacher, not my sister?” (Since he was little, he has called me sister, not aunt.) I laughed. “No, I’m always your sister.” He was happy to hear that.

The night before our first day of lessons, I was stressed. Before I went to bed, I worried, “What if he doesn’t understand me? What if he asks me a question that I don’t have an answer for?” But I hoped everything would go smoothly.

Day one as Nemo’s teacher: 

9:00 a.m. Nemo is awake before me, already watching Pokémon. “Time to start school!” I said. He jumps up and says, “I have to take a shower first!” He never likes taking showers in the morning! But before I can stop him, he’s run away to the bathroom. Sigh. It’s only day one.

10:05 a.m.: We finally start our yoga session in my bedroom. Even before I open my computer, he sits, crosses his legs, closes his eyes and chants, “Ommmm.” He learned this from a movie he loves. I can’t stop myself from laughing. Then he starts laughing. At least we are letting some energy out.

But then he realizes I am serious. We cross our legs on the floor. We twist and stretch our backs up like cats. He thinks it’s really fun and wants to do it again and again. My first success!

10:45 a.m.: On to reading. Nemo chooses the book. Of course, he selects one about coyotes that he has read a hundred times before. He reads out loud, but he’s basically memorized every page. I try asking questions: What do coyotes eat? Where do coyotes live? Nemo knows every single detail. Maybe I should choose the next book.

11:00 a.m. Nemo wants a break, and because it is the first day, I say OK. I use the time to answer school emails. I have a new English assignment in my inbox, but I can’t do it now. I have to focus on Nemo.

11:15 a.m. Since the shutdown, I have been really stressed, and my former teacher suggested I try a meditation app. Today, Nemo joins me. We sit and close our eyes. “Ommmm,” Nemo yells. Here we go again! The app tells us to focus on our breath, relax our muscles, let everything go. “Her voice is too soft!” Nemo shouts. “Shhhhhh,” I whisper back. I adjust his legs, put his hands on his knees and lightly use my fingers to close his eyes. We focus for three minutes … and then my mom walks in, holding the phone. “Safiya, I need you to translate for the doctor.” A few minutes later, we try again. “We are being serious now,” I tell Nemo. I have to be serious so he can focus, but inside I’m laughing. Meditation usually takes 10 minutes. Today it takes 25 minutes. And it is in no way relaxing.

11:45 a.m. Time for math. Nemo knows his 1 to 5 multiplication tables. We practice the first multiplication table, and I ask him to write them down. “This is boring!” he shouts. I start panicking. How do I make math interesting? “I’m going to time you,” I tell him. He is excited to beat the timer. Success. Now we need to learn the six times tables.

12:30 p.m. A second break: Oreos and apple juice. Nemo excitedly tells me how he wants to become a scientist and find dinosaur DNA. Maybe tomorrow we can study science together?

12:55 p.m. One final book, this one a little harder: Curious George Makes Pancakes. I ask him to read it out loud, but he quickly gets mad. “NO, this is hard!” he says, frustrated that he cannot read out loud and wanting to stop. I end up reading to him. There is a lot of new vocabulary: fundraiser, volunteers, speech. I try to explain each one, and he tries hard to focus. “Can you make pancakes for me?” he asks. I promise him that we will on Saturday. But today, I have two conference calls, three class assignments, one online training for my day care job, and I need to help my dad and brother plant fruits and vegetables in the backyard.

I declare today’s school completed.

We’ve come a long way since that first day teaching Nemo. We are up to the 8 times tables in math, and we’ve been studying space. He particularly likes black holes. He still laughs during yoga — I’m not quite sure why. And sometimes he still gets impatient with reading.

I have only one student, and it’s exhausting. I can’t imagine how my teachers manage their classes and support as many as 150 students a day. I appreciate them more than ever before. But I’m also excited and proud that Nemo has continued to learn over the past month even if he can’t be with his classmates. I never worried about his education before. Seeing him now as a learner makes me better understand how small things frustrate him, but also how fast he is at math and how excited he is by science.

Given our new reality, there is a lot I feel I don’t know. But one thing I do know now is that I can make this new reality positive, productive and loving for my nephew. And that means maybe it can be the same for me.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

Safiya Al-Samarrai is a first-year college student studying nursing at Middlesex Community College in Lowell, Massachusetts. Her nephew, Nemo, is a third-grader in elementary school.

This isn’t how most school years usually go.

But soon, in less than a month, school will be over and it will be “summer break.” I think that by then, it won’t feel like summer break. It’ll feel like quarantine, because we’ve been home since March.

That’s the problem: Summer break starts on June 5, and it’s going to be a lot like our last few months of distance learning. But it’s also going to be way worse than our usual summers. It’s going to be the same, but also different.

My days won’t change a whole lot when school ends. I’ll still be in quarantine at home, doing the same stuff I’ve done since March. It’ll just feel even more boring because the online video calls for school will end and they’ll stop sending us work to do.

I’ll also feel sad, because I won’t be able to stop thinking about seeing my friends again. Most days, I still won’t be able to see any of them, because they could have the virus, for all we know. Even when I can see them, we won’t get to actually play — I’ll have to be six feet away and won’t be able to throw and catch a ball with them. There aren’t many games that you can play while social distancing. We keep in touch on video calls separate from our school day and we’ve started sending letters, but it’s not the same as seeing them in person.

I suppose we’ll try to have fun even without our friends. And there’s always stuff to do inside with my family. We’ve been entertaining ourselves like this for a while. This summer, we’ll play with my little brother. He likes it when we read books, especially Dr. Seuss’s Fox in Socks and Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now! He also likes it when we talk to him and build block towers and castles for him to destroy. When he’s busy, I’ll play games like Hanabi, Rat-A-Tat-Cat and Boggle.

We’ll also get outside sometimes too. We can go on hikes in Rock Creek Park, so long as we are careful to stay away from other people. I’ve been working on training for a half-marathon, so maybe I can get up early and go running sometimes with my dad.

But it’s still going to be hard. Most summers, we’d play in the city’s splash parks and playgrounds. We’d celebrate birthdays. We’d go on trips to see family. Now, because of the pandemic, all of that is gone. This summer might be a lot like the spring, but it’s not going to be anything like the summer I wanted.

Still, during the quarantine, I’ve been thinking about how many doctors and nurses are working across the world to save people’s lives. They’re acting bravely and trying their best to help people even when they’re in danger of getting the virus themselves. If they can tough it out, then I can handle a few more months stuck at home, busting my dad’s chops.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

Owain Williams is nearly finished with third grade at a public school in Washington, D.C.

For a while, I agreed. I could watch television for hours on end, have daily FaceTime calls with friends and study, all without unnecessarily exposing myself to the coronavirus. This “break” seemed like a blessing in disguise. I could relax while doing well in school and still maintain a semi-social life by texting, calling or even sending selfies on social media. Modern technology was the silver lining to this quarantine. Or so it seemed.

Just one week into the lockdown, my vision of a blissful, calming pause in the school year turned melancholy when my grandmother’s partner of almost 14 years passed away from lung cancer. Because of the pandemic, new laws passed in Los Angeles regulating the number of people who could attend a funeral meant my family had to mourn alone. I had no experience grieving for someone I held so close to my heart. Suddenly, it felt like nothing could raise my spirits. I longed for an escape from this new reality of the world around me and my isolation at home. I dreamed of utopias and alternate universes in which coronavirus had never infected people and the man I thought of as my grandfather still talked to me. Suddenly, in the middle of one of my daydreams, I jolted out of bed and knew what I had to do: I would read books.

In the morning, I created a list of novels by famous authors whom I longed to read. Tales that had been published far before I was born filled my online shopping cart, and as soon as the books arrived, I dug in. While the pieces I selected did not take place in true utopias, they took my mind off current events. I laughed at Lady Susan’s flirtatious behavior and shuddered at the demise of Dorian Gray. Through these characters and their fictionalized worlds, I imagined a better future rather than dwelling in the present or longing for the past.

I am shocked by how unappealing technology has become for me during this “corona-cation.” Except for school, which occupies about six hours of my day, I sit with a book in hand, taking in the words of historical authors. My free time hardly includes a computer unless I am writing or studying, and my phone has never been used less. Yes, communication with some of the real characters in my life has taken a hit. I still talk with friends on a daily basis, but there’s almost nothing to chat about other than school and the virus. As odd as this sounds, my fictional friends have far more interesting news to share. I love my real-life friends, don’t get me wrong, but new and interesting conversation starters are very hard to come by at a moment when we aren’t going anywhere, meeting anyone or experiencing anything particularly new. Who would have thought paperbacks would be my savior in a moment controlled by the internet?

In these novels, people are living with passion, falling in love and finding themselves in tricky little situations. Traveling around the world is not prohibited but rather encouraged, and illness is not the most common cause of death. Holding hands is expected rather than tabooed, and gathering in large groups each night is downright ordinary. The lives these characters live bring me back to the months before quarantine, and suddenly, the sun starts to peek out of my gray, cloudy mindset.

As a child, years before I owned a cell phone, operated a computer or knew any websites other than YouTube, my days were filled with books. Harry Potter filled my mind with wonder, while The Mysterious Benedict Society planted excitement. I credit books with shaping my sense of humor and curious ideas, among other things. The stories were my mind’s food, and it was always hungry. Friendships like those in Ivy and Bean and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants encouraged me to go out of my way and meet new people, but also to never forget my oldest companions. Meanwhile, Wonder taught me the importance of not judging someone for their looks and to be kind to everyone. Eventually, my imagination ran stale, and my spark for wonder flickered just a bit less. Yet in just a handful of pandemic-inflicted weeks, that youthfulness has returned, right when I needed it most.

Even though I’ve experienced heartbreak and solitude, rediscovering my literary self has been a major positive. The objects that have anchored me through these crazy times, books, have been thrown to the side by most because technology often seems more appealing; but television is not a lifesaver. We probably all agree that Netflix is fun for short periods, but when you find yourself rewatching Gossip Girl or Glee once again, don’t be scared to hit the off button. If you are not simply cruising through this downtime but find yourself struggling, worried or lost, then rethink picking up a book — it won’t bite. Instead, reading will take your mind off the present, inspiring you to look with positivity toward the future.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

Talia Natterson is a sophomore at Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences, a private school in Los Angeles, California. She writes for her school publication, Crossfire.

Like most people with a mental illness, I used to have a routine I relied upon to mitigate the effects of suffering on my life. I attended school, went to club meetings and took calls in an attempt to make bad days feel more normal. I used responsibilities as motivators to avoid disrupting my life, even when it wasn’t easy. In short: I relied on the day-to-day of “normal” life to pull me out of a bad headspace.

But as any student or teacher knows, a “high school experience” is closely defined by the people who participate in it. Particularly for vulnerable young people, teachers and adults can be a refuge from complicated home lives. I’m a gay sexual assault survivor, and despite my having incredible parents, my teachers were an important backbone to my support network.

For two years, my history teacher and I met on Tuesday mornings to check in before class. Most days we’d make jokes about our school’s poorly scheduled construction or failing sports teams, but on some, his was the only smile I saw all day. Since school closed, we haven’t spoken in nearly two months.

As with many young people across the nation, most of my relationships, routines and responsibilities were upended by the coronavirus. The comfort and familiarity of my day-to-day life were replaced by the fear and tragedy of watching my friends get sick, both mentally and physically.

Difficult access to medicine has exacerbated an already taxing time for mental health. To be clear, all medications are still technically available. However, as people flock to “virtual” psychiatrists, during the pandemic make it difficult to fill certain prescriptions. In particular, medications used to prevent panic attacks are heavily regulated, as they act similarly to opioids for people without PTSD. After my former psychiatrist discontinued care, I spent around 12 hours on the phone with different providers before finding a psychiatrist willing to fill a prescription I’ve used for months. In the process, I spent days without vital medication.

But even for people who didn’t previously need formal mental health care, the general culture of stress, anxiety and grief created by the virus has strong mental health implications. Nearly all of my close friends describe feeling hopeless, anxious or sad. I’ve listened to many of my friends hyperventilate into crying spells in recent weeks, something that never happened prior to the virus. Some even began contemplating self-harm.

Despite my best efforts to help, nothing I said improved their mental health in a meaningful way. It felt as though our conversations were like Band-Aids on gunshot wounds that require professional treatment. However, the therapeutic resources they need are in short supply, as people across the nation are struggling with similar issues.

In times of scarcity, friends — in this case, fellow students — often fill the roles of informal therapists, despite having neither the training nor the resources to do so. Among my friends who are newly struggling with mental health, almost all of them reached out to me or other students with mental illness for help, asking about issues ranging from decreasing anxiety attacks to preventing self-harm.

While well-meaning, these advice sessions often devolved into complex therapeutic questions. Online chats became sites for makeshift group therapy. In ordinary circumstances, I wouldn’t feel guilty about lacking the skills to do this. Previously, being able to recommend formal resources allowed me to feel comfortable and confident in the health of my friends when I knew I couldn’t help. It soothed my worries for others and allowed me to focus more on my own health, which is a difficult juggling act even in ordinary times. But with fewer formal resources, some students won’t get the help that they need.

In response, a number of are providing free counseling, therapy and mental health resources to struggling teenagers. While they’ve temporarily helped many of my friends, they’re a solution with a time clock, particularly as some free services become overwhelmed. Nonetheless, as therapists and mental health care providers work to accommodate an increased need, crowdsourced therapy funds and free resources are helping to bridge the divide.

Beyond formal counseling, my close friends and I are starting to find new ways to cope in quarantine. Personally, I now make weekly to-do lists instead of daily ones, which gives me more flexibility on my sluggish days. I’m in the process of adopting running as a quarantine hobby, though it can probably be better described as walking with an overzealous and easily distracted puppy. Regardless, interrupting my screen time is becoming more important, especially as social media and Netflix become staples of my daily routine. Some of my friends have started making new playlists, getting dressed up despite staying home, and doing homework outside to help cope with the impacts of social isolation.

Everyone manages school closures differently, but choosing to view coronavirus lockdowns as physical distancing in social solidarity is important. Connection is vital in uncertain and scary times, particularly as the impact of the virus persists. Checking in on those around us won’t solve mental health problems or eliminate the stress of coronavirus, but in some cases, it can be the necessary first step to help students get the support that they need.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

Emily Bach is a senior attending high school in Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools.

This is the sound of me throwing on an empty baseball field just down the road from my house. I hadn’t thrown for a few days at this point and I’m at ease with the way my arm is treating me. I’m throwing harder than usual. Maybe it’s stress. It probably is. My last competitive outing as a relief pitcher for my high school baseball team was March 5, more than a month ago. I don’t remember the exact specifics or even the final score.

Unfortunately, that game doesn’t count anymore. It’s not my main concern. The vast and ruinous spread of COVID-19 not only canceled my senior baseball season for good but also prematurely ended my entire baseball career.

We were getting ready for a Friday night contest under the lights in Burlingame, California, 20 minutes south of San Francisco. We don’t play many evening games, which makes them adored and enjoyed by parents, coaches and players. The festive mood was highlighted by food and drinks as we patiently waited for the junior varsity game before ours to wrap up. So when the news leaked that the , our seemingly normal heartbeats went up a notch.

There was a 30 percent chance of rain going into the game. Now, there was a 110 percent chance of utter fear and apprehension.

“Something feels odd. Something is going to happen,” I told a teammate before the game.”I have a strange vibe right now.”

Let it be known that I don’t read palms and am probably less enticed to after this saga, but something was legitimately bothering me. During our pregame quad-pulls exercise, one of the coaches approached me and underscored what I was thinking.

“Hey, this isn’t looking good right now. Don’t tell anyone; keep warming up,” he said. “But it looks like they’re going to shut us down.”

However disappointed, we quickly understood that the magnitude of our situation was extremely far from what our basketball team was going through that evening. Before their playoff bout against a beatable team, the game was unplugged and postponed due to the school’s COVID-19 connection. When it was revealed later that a student tested positive for the virus, the basketball team’s entire season was snatched from them by league officials. One of the school’s will never again have their day on the hardwood, and it’s a tough pill to swallow.

Stuff happens, though. We weren’t in the basketball team’s shoes; we weren’t stranded on a cruise ship; we didn’t have grandparents suffering to breathe. We didn’t have any of that, yet we were concerned about not playing baseball.

It’s a gut punch, but if I were in the position to run any type of spring sporting league, I’d shut us down too. Heck, worrying about baseball at this point seems almost useless. People are dying, depressed and scared.

I don’t even know what day it is today. Every morning, every afternoon, every evening — it’s all, well, the same. Never has Yogi Berra’s famous quote about “déjà vu all over again” seemed more apt.

It’s been a long while since I’ve been at home for this many consecutive long, dull days. I’ve started a routine where I wake up every morning, rip the covers in a flash, and look in the mirror to see if I’m Bill Murray in Groundhog Day yet.

The events that have taken place after California’s shelter-in-place order have turned out to be a little less adventurous and a little more mind-wrecking.

I’ve struggled to work on my baseball skills. I’ve thrown a handful of times, but I don’t think I’ve even swung a bat once. My workouts are abbreviated, sometimes nonexistent. It’s difficult to become motivated when everything heard around you has the opposite effect. Around this time during the season, I would be completely energized every morning, ready to work out. I often used my senior physical education class to complete my two required workouts during the week.

At home, the distractions are endless. Falling into television land, scrolling through social media, unneeded eating at random hours of the day are all potential pitfalls. Although I still feel healthy enough to play right now, the void baseball leaves in my life creates ongoing “could haves” and “should haves” in terms of working out.

The fact that everything is a huge question mark is frightening. The fact that I might not have a regular graduation is cringeworthy. The very slim possibility that I may graduate walking across my living room on Zoom scares me to death, almost as if four years of hard work has virtually no reward.

I don’t know if I’ll have the opportunity to walk across the theater stage to receive my diploma on May 24, a tradition that has occurred for 70 years at my San Francisco high school. I’m disappointed that I’ll never play organized baseball again, as I enter college to pursue a broadcasting and journalism career. My silver lining through all of this is knowing that the relationships that I created through baseball, like teammates and coaches, will last well into adulthood and beyond.

I fell in love with baseball in third grade and never looked back. At a young age, I stunk in Little League but got better after endless hours of throwing a tennis ball against my garage, swinging a bat a million times and watching to learn as much of the sport as possible. I love the way the dirt smells, the sound of cleats crunching crisply against pavement, the ball hitting the mitt. It’s a game of feels and sounds, which is beyond calming.

Being part of a team has helped me learn key attributes that I can utilize as I enter adulthood, such as humility, confidence, leadership and respect.

I love baseball because anything can happen. The best team could destroy the worst team one day, and it could be the other way around the next. It reminds me about the reality of our current moment. Yeah, I’m upset, I’m disappointed, but I’ve come to terms with it. After all, life is 50 percent random. This time around, life just happened to throw me a curveball. What happens when you get thrown a curveball in baseball? You wait back, square it up and hit the thing 450 feet to dead center field. Of course, it’s far more complicated than that, which is why we need to work together on killing off this pandemic. It takes more than one.

An old coach once told me that the 11th commandment is to “find a way.” Now, I’m not sure if Moses came up with that, but it fits many situations in life that need conquering.

COVID-19 could use some conquering.

I’m going to follow the rules and make the most of these rough times. After all, my actions might help save a life or two.

That’s what matters.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

I had been grieving the end of my Ultimate Frisbee season. This year — my senior season — was going to be our team’s chance to win a second straight Division I collegiate national championship. Finding out that we wouldn’t see the payoff of our work was a tough pill to swallow.

But I was missing the bigger picture, and my housemate’s words woke me up. He had just lost 10 months of work coordinating our university’s spring concert series in the blink of an eye. And more importantly, the world outside our college community was coming apart at the seams: Unemployment rates had already begun to , and medical professionals were reusing disposable masks in . Everyone had losses to grieve, and the best thing we could do was to support each other through a difficult time.

In the weeks since, I have felt surprising solidarities form over the shared difficulty of adjusting to our socially distant, mostly virtual world.

Of course, the pandemic has different effects on everyone. I was in an advantageous position compared to many peers. I was able to go back to the rural Vermont town I grew up in, which now feels like something of a refuge. What about my classmates who feel threatened at home, for whom university was a safe haven? What about those who live thousands of miles away from campus? What about students who had families relying on their on-campus income? This tragedy affects all of us differently, with disproportionate threats to those already vulnerable.

Yet paradoxically, at the same time, the virus also puts many of us in the same boat. We’re stuck inside, bored, and unsure of what the future may hold. Previously, I may have tried to avoid most social media, but now digital connectivity has begun to offer an unexpected solace. I, along with , am laughing at memes about Tiger King on Netflix. I’m watching Cardi B’s Instagram . I’m sending videos to friends of Rube Goldberg-esque quarantine of ping-pong balls bouncing through halls and down stairs to their eventual target. Though absolutely no one is glad for the circumstances, our country has never had so much shared content to connect us.

In classes also, I’ve seen the challenging circumstances bring people closer. Two weeks ago, my religious studies professor sent out a poem that described the pandemic as a reminder to us all “that we are connected in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.” And a few days ago, my biostatistics professor began class by introducing everyone to her 1-year-old child, who gave the webcam a confused stare.

These intimacies make me smile. But of course, I still don’t know what to make of this world I’m supposed to enter after graduation. I’m in the fortunate position of having finished my job search, but many peers are trying to plan their future at a time when the coming months are unknown. I’ve seen a spreadsheet on Facebook that supposedly offers insight on which companies are still hiring and which ones have frozen their programs. The world may be ending, but apparently the job search isn’t.

Even though “normal” has gone out the window, everyone is still trying to do the best they can for themselves and for each other. I feel a sense of solidarity, even in isolation. These past weeks, I have been immersed in my honors thesis project on a personalized learning initiative in my home state of Vermont. Every 10 pages or so, I’ll text an update to my thesis writing buddy. At school, we used to have a weekly writing date for mutual accountability. Now, text updates stand in for check-ins whispered between our desks at the Rockefeller Library. There will be no presentation of our thesis findings, save perhaps for a Zoom forum, but we push on regardless because … what other choice do we have? We do what we can with the situation at hand.

One imagined scene motivates me above all else to keep pushing: our commencement, inevitably belated. It’s October 2020, and the trees on my university’s main green are just starting to tinge orange. Rows of folding chairs fill the quad. A crowd of students in robes and tassels wait on the street down the hill, getting ready to walk through the gates. We all came back from jobs and grad schools for this weekend. Not everyone is here, but those who couldn’t make the trip appear on phone screens over FaceTime. We smile and embrace each other easily, with the sense that, together, we have overcome something. Daylight starts to fade, the air starts to chill, and we shuffle into place, readying ourselves to walk through the gates.

In this time of uncertainty, we’re all we have. What’s important comes into focus. And together, we will make it through, with the help of Zoom calls, check-in texts and Joe Exotic.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

My parents pulled me out of this school after third grade because they felt I wasn’t receiving the education I needed and sent me to the one I attend now, a college-prep private high school, which is academically very rigorous. My current educational environment is one without goats, surrounded by fields without magic. Like most students, I take standardized tests and do chemistry projects. I learn grammar and calculus and conjugate Spanish verbs. We talk about college entrance exams and career goals. All very practical. But despite all that, until several weeks ago, I learned face-to-face with my teachers and fellow students, gossiped with my friends at lunch, played volleyball or did yoga in gym class, and was surrounded by a learning community.

As a 10th-grader living in the hard-hit New York metro area during the COVID-19 crisis, I find that my educational life has changed dramatically. I have been doing all-day online classes and coursework, meant to replicate the experience of being in school. And it is at this time that I can’t help remembering my tactile childhood education and wondering if there aren’t more fruitful and less stressful ways to learn.

Sitting in front of my computer for seven hours a day, constantly going in and out of Zoom video classes, I have found it difficult to actively engage with my academic materials without real-life interaction with my peers, teachers and community. With only my mother and older brother in the house, respectively involved in teaching and learning online, it has been isolating and lonely. The practice of social distancing has helped me realize that active engagement in a learning community is one of the most important aspects of an education. Physical activity, whether doing lab experiments in science, shooting videos for art or solving math problems on a whiteboard, helps make learning real. Engagement in outdoor spaces makes education meaningful, while self-isolation has made my academic life feel caged in. Only a few months ago, in science class, we released monarch butterflies outside, after they hatched in our classroom. Maybe mistaking my bright orange sweater for a flower, one landed on my shoulder for a moment before flying away. I miss those small, beautiful moments of tangible learning.

The COVID-19 crisis has been not only a deterioration of an engaging learning experience but also a time filled with worry and concern. We wash our hands, and we wash them again. We stand six feet apart. We calculate whether leaving the house, even for a walk, is worth the risk. My father is a practicing physician at a major hospital, and although he is not in direct contact with COVID-19 patients, many of his colleagues are sick. Therefore, isolation has been even more anxiety-provoking and scary. I worry for his health, and also for my brother, a high school senior, and whether he will miss out on graduation. I worry for myself whether I will be able to be a good candidate for college with new systems of AP testing and this “lost” semester. Will I be able to perform well on at-home, 45-minute free response AP tests? Will I perform as well in my online classes as I did when we were actually at school?

I realize now that even in my college-prep school, learning emerges from physical togetherness, creative freedom and tangible experience. Education is not only about transferring information from teacher to student but also creating experiences in an environment where students can teach themselves. English class is about the rules of grammar, yes, but also about learning how to think critically in a group of peers, express opinions and listen actively to others. It is not the antiseptic lessons themselves that matter so much as getting our hands dirty in tangible learning. After this crisis is over, is there a way to value the importance of tactile, physical learning even more, realizing that the digital world can never substitute for (metaphorical, virus-free) dirt under our fingernails?

I remember my first-grade playmates and our collective magic. I remember being dirty and playing impractical games. I remember climbing trees and dreaming. These wild memories of another place and time sustain me and remind me that even in these scary months, we can still create the world and educational system we want and need.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

I’d been keeping up with COVID-19 since December. I first read about it in an email from “,” a daily newsletter. I didn’t know it would become a pandemic. At the time of our conversation, there were no confirmed cases in Kentucky. I didn’t understand how quickly a virus could spread across the globe, let alone how fast it could come to my state.

Two days later, on March 6, Gov. Andy Beshear announced the first COVID-19 case in Kentucky. That sure made things a whole lot more real. When my district in Louisville, the largest in the state, put out its “Pandemic Viral Event Plan Summary,” I started to consider the possibility of school closures. Then, on March 12, the district announced that we’d close the following Monday until April 6.

That’s what makes this scary. It happened so fast. To say the least, I’m not happy. I’m mad, frustrated, sad — and a little bored. Some are excited to be off of school for several weeks. I can’t say the same. This is my senior year. My best friends and I canceled our spring break trip. We might not finish our game of senior soakers. There might not be a prom or class trip. Maybe not even graduation. With closure now extended to at least April 20, that means that more of our senior events may be canceled. The past three and a half years have built up to these final few months of senior year — when school becomes less of a struggle and more about spending relaxed time with friends, classmates and teachers.

For me, the worst part is the timing. This is my last lacrosse season. My teammates are my best friends. Practice is the best part of my day — an escape from a tough school schedule and worries about my future. Lacrosse has my back. It’s helped me grow physically and mentally as I have improved my skills and relationships on and off the field. The season is when I feel most at home and alive; and because of the connections I’ve made, it’s the only place I feel I can be my authentic self. When school was first called off, the other captains and I tried to organize some player-led practices because we thought we’d get back to our season in two or three weeks. But understandably, that couldn’t happen due to social distancing guidelines. I still practice by myself outside — alone.

I know this all may sound trivial, and it is. I joke with my friends about “the rona” and laugh about the possibility of a virtual graduation ceremony. But the truth is, I’m scared. I’m worried that some people my age don’t understand the magnitude of this crisis. I continue to see some of my peers having sleepovers, going to parks together and generally disregarding our state’s social distancing and “healthy at home” guidelines. Just this week, a few friends were still hoping to go away together for spring break.

I know this is hard. After two weeks at home, my heart hurts. I feel a little helpless. But I also know that my generation, seniors especially, are some of the most resilient people on the planet. Some of us have stood up for student rights in schools. We’ve organized marches for gun reform, climate change and women’s rights. This situation is no exception. I encourage everyone, not just seniors, to do something. Pick up some groceries for an elderly neighbor (but still practice social distancing!). Call your grandparents. Write thank-you letters to health care workers — they deserve it. Write to people in nursing homes — they need it. Thank a teacher for their continued efforts under horrible circumstances. Watch that movie your mom keeps begging you to see — in my mom’s case, that would be A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.

I’ve come to find a new normal. Every morning, I open my curtains and windows and do “” on YouTube. Then I drink a cup of coffee, sit by the window in my newly rearranged room and listen to the birds. I spend the middle of my days cleaning, reading Pride and Prejudice, throwing a lacrosse ball and doing schoolwork. I take my dog, Blu, for a walk, and I end most days by calling or FaceTiming a few friends. Finding new purpose and taking time to do things I enjoy has helped me cope with, even enjoy, being forced to stay at home.

Every day at 5 p.m., I sit with my laptop in front of me and watch Gov. Beshear’s daily press conference, typing updates to publish for “On the Record,” our school newsmagazine. Watching these helps me feel more at ease, especially when Beshear begins by encouraging all Kentuckians to say, “We will get through this. We will get through this together.” The Facebook group “” starts to blow up at 5 o’clock, with admiring words for how the governor is handling the crisis. His optimism and positive leadership makes hearing the scary stuff — about and the state’s struggle to fund — a little less scary. This feeling of unity encourages me to practice social distancing and stay home.

But afterward, when I watch the national news with my mom, much of this hope turns again to fear, worry and sadness. I see doctors in Italy forced to choose whom to administer care to. I hear news that New York is on its way to similar conditions, with not far behind. I see videos of nurses with tears in their eyes begging people to stay home.

During the first week my district was out, I watched an episode of Dr. Phil with my mom. We rarely watch it, but this episode featured some self-absorbed teens, and she thought I’d find it amusing. At the end, the subject shifted to the coronavirus. Dr. Phil started talking about how to manage anxiety. I’m paraphrasing, but here’s the gist:

Right now, people are anxious because they see the virus and the pandemic as a huge, unstoppable monster. They see themselves as small individuals who can’t do anything but be threatened by the monster. We need to switch that narrative. We have to look at ourselves as the big scary monster, and the virus as something that should be scared of us.

For it to be scared of us, we have to come together, support each other and do our part by staying home. So let’s get to it.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

The night before, I couldn’t get to sleep. I even woke up earlier than usual: 7 a.m. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, remote learning for Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, California, started just over a week ago.

California is under a shelter-in-place order. But in the place where I live, I can still go out to the park and run (staying a safe distance from my neighbors, of course) or go with my parents to buy groceries. Those are special occasions. On a normal day, I’m at home, living under a rock, asking my cat why she doesn’t like me and occasionally trying to practice piano without annoying my neighbors.

On that first day of distance learning, after making myself a bagel, I anxiously tested my Chromebook’s video camera as I opened Zoom and waited for it to load … until it didn’t. I correctly inferred that my Fullerton Joint Union High School District-managed Chromebook blocked Zoom. At least Google Classroom worked.

A restart later, Classroom was blocked, and Zoom was operating.

Once the glitches got worked out, I opened an email from a school counselor containing one of those meant-to-be-inspirational quotes that typically finds a place in our second-period morning announcements:

“You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.” —Eckhart Tolle

As I worked my way through that glitchy first day, it occurred to me that in small ways I was suddenly being asked to rearrange the circumstances of my life. Here’s a snapshot:

First Period: Honors Algebra 2

I responsibly copied my notes for half an hour, then tuned in to Zoom.

My math teacher typically leads us in stress-relieving breathing exercises, so when one of my classmates suggested that we have a mindful moment, Mrs. Bueno went with it and led us online. I don’t know if any of my peers followed her instructions to close our eyes and breathe to her counts, but it helped lower my stress.

Second Period: Chinese 3 

I tried to finish my math homework since I accidentally did the Chinese assignment the night before.

When I finished, I went to the optional Google Meet and talked to my teacher and some classmates face-to-face, which led to a few impromptu house tours and pet shows.

Third Period: AP Language and Composition

After my chill Chinese class, I left my camera on so my classmates could see my face and surroundings.

As our teacher explained the assignment, an essay we would write using the College Board’s AP Classroom app, her dog kept barking in the background; in the chat, someone suggested a face reveal for her dog, which she gave (her chocolate Lab mix, Trooper, is very large and majestic).

At first, the College Board secure site on my Chromebook wasn’t working, so I called a friend to make sure I wasn’t the only one — I was the only one — then retried (success!). I took out a sheet of paper and a pen (is that cheating?) to organize my thesis on a topic once remote and now more relevant than I ever thought possible: living off-the-grid.

Although I was quite comfortable at my desk at home, wrapped in my childhood Hello Kitty blanket, I found myself missing my not-as-comfortable bright yellow chair and gray desk in Room 32, where I would be slightly peer pressured to work faster on my essay and finish before break (at home, I didn’t finish). Instead, I was surrounded by three of my younger siblings, ages 9 to 15, all on separate laptops and computers, who worked on their own distance learning assignments.

Fourth Period: AP U.S. History

I entered the Meet with my homework Google Doc open (never mind that I forgot about doing the assignment) and my classwork packet ready (I did that one), but then my Wi-Fi connection decided to die right when my teacher started talking about why Al Capone is the gangster you have to remember for the AP test.

While I developed a new kind of FOMO (fear of missing out), I asked my classmates on the Google Meet chat if anyone else heard my teacher’s voice breaking up, to make sure I wasn’t the only one.

I was the only one.

Fifth Period: Advanced Journalism (and lunch)

After I finished a reflection piece on the latest issue of our school newspaper, my mom invited me to eat lunch, so I ate during fifth period like I normally do — one of the perks of being on staff of The Accolade — and made my own Google Meet to say hi to friends during the next period, lunch.

All of us bonded over the weirdness of the day and had a few technological difficulties of our own while chatting. Although happy to see their faces, I missed their physical presence. I missed lunchtime activities like Christian Club and Book Club (I’m a nerd). I even missed the days I skipped lunch and ran around trying to get interviews for a story.

Just when I started to feel sad, irony stopped me in my tracks. I realized that I was plugged in the entire day, just like the screen-addicted generation my peers and I are already accused of being. Now, we have no choice. I mean, it’s not my fault that the only way I can talk to other humans is through a video camera.

At least I had some non-virtual social interaction — well, with my siblings.

Sixth Period: Honors Chemistry

For Honors Chemistry, I invited my two younger brothers to watch two teachers and a student teacher light snacks on fire. The lab was so lit (excuse me, I had to) that we watched it on repeat. By myself, I stared at my screen for a hot minute before I understood the actual assignment.

While some of the kinks have been worked out since that first day, it’s only the beginning of a long experiment in this brave new world of remote learning. I haven’t exactly achieved Eckhart Tolle’s goal of realizing who I am at the deepest level. But I did get to see a Funyun glow white-hot four times.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.

It’s been 11 days since my high school closed due to the coronavirus, and I’m conflicted.

Of course, I’m concerned for the health of my family and community. But as self-absorbed as it feels to say it, I’m also worried about not being able to go to prom. At times, I’m excited by the prospect of a five-week staycation. At others, I unexpectedly miss my school’s fluorescent lights and jam-packed halls.

Occasionally, I feel like the time off gives me a chance to relax and do my work at a leisurely pace while I read the ever-growing pile of novels and memoirs on my bedside table or binge-watch the latest seasons of The Good Place, On My Block and the many other TV shows I adore. But sometimes, the prospect of an unstructured month incites an overwhelming sense of panic. I worry that in the absence of a defined schedule and 6 a.m. wake-up, I will end up ignoring my assignments or failing my AP tests.

That last dichotomy is perhaps the most difficult to navigate: How can I stay productive, but not so productive that I run out of things to do come next week? I pivot between feeling like I’ve fallen too far behind and like there’s no way to stay busy.

My school district’s response has not helped. The sole instruction we received on our last day in school was a four-page packet replete with such helpful ideas for staying busy and mentally stimulated as “Create your own dance and host a family dance-off” or “Go outside and find a fire hydrant. What is the shape of the nut on a fire hydrant?”

In the week since, teachers have sent out assignments for students to complete as we can. Yet without any unified system for online learning, we are left with a patchwork web of projects for students to keep track of themselves with little support. I stress myself out simply trying to remember which of my teachers use Canvas and which use Google Classroom, not to mention completing the assignments contained therein.

To be fair, the district is in a tough spot. Clearly, it’s more important that students have access to regular meals than that I pass my AP Lang test. In my county, which encompasses the city of Lexington, Kentucky, more than of children are food insecure, and the school district has done an admirable job of at schools and bus stops. Still, the haphazard and retroactive nature of the administration’s response is making life more difficult than necessary for teachers and students. I especially worry for those without access to the internet or a computer, as of households in my county lack a broadband internet subscription. Although the district is hand-delivering materials to students in this category, it seems unlikely that packets of notes and homework will be as instructional as virtual classes and direct communication with teachers. As school districts around the country make the rapid transition to online learning, they must also consider the students for whom such demands are unmeetable.

In sum, this pandemic has been stressful. I suppose I should not be surprised, and I must admit that much of my distress is due to having spent the vast majority of the past week inside my house, with minimal face-to-face contact with anyone outside of my immediate family.

But in the midst of all this worry and disarray, I’m trying to remind myself of the small joys this quarantine has brought me. My friends and I hold nightly video calls to share the highlights of our admittedly empty days, updating each other on our latest baking projects or lack of progress on chemistry assignments. My teachers send sweet emails as they navigate new technologies and unclear guidelines, passing along what limited information they have about the district’s plans for online schooling or graduation. My favorite local businesses continue their annual traditions as best they can — March Madness may be canceled, but Donut Madness certainly won’t be, even if we have to rely on drive-through and delivery.

I’m slowly coming to realize that it’s impossible for me to know the course this pandemic will take. And in a culture used to constant productivity and order, that’s scary. But at a time when so much is out of my hands, there’s one thing I can control — whether taking the time to get outside and walk my dog, or painting my nails rather than “pre-crastinate” on schoolwork, I can choose to be kind to myself.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.