 How was your life before the pandemic? So not to brag or anything, but my life before 2020 was in freaking credible. I was crushing it in sports and academics for my muse. I had so much energy and love of life that I volunteered to, you know, to share that love. High school can be a jungle, but I was on an adventure safari with my friends and classmates, so it was all good. And despite what you might think of school, I looked forward to going every day to expand my knowledge pool. I think you all know what happened next. The pandemic was announced and the adventure was cut short. I was in lockdown like the rest of you, and for me it was like house arrest, but worse. At least in house arrest you can have people come over. Hanging out with friends in school were now just these moving images on a monitor through a video call. Volunteering became hopeless too. I mean I couldn't exactly teleport food or make objects through a laptop screen. Not like there were events to volunteer at anyhow. Oh and sports? Goodbye team games. Hello to taking furtive runs or walks around my neighborhood. Choosing odd hours so I don't get too close to anyone else taking a walk. You'd think that being able to at least talk to your friends would help, but when it's restricted to discord chats that have voice delays or lockdown snapchats, it starts to feel unreal. It feels cold. My mental health was plummeting and my days became a grey wash of so what? Who cares? The most alluring part of my days was now going to sleep, because at least in dreams I could escape this confinement. Rather than the joy of life providing the wave on which I could surf, my only push now was more like a cattle prod. And that was the pressure of university applications. I had to do well, or else there really would be no hope at all for climbing out of this pit. That's what I felt anyhow. So you can imagine hearing about the transition back to actual physical classrooms. I was elated. I was nearly bursting with eagerness to go back, feeling like yes, this was all a nightmare and it's about to end. The result was less than spectacular. We weren't really back in class, so much as a bunch of sheep herded into a pen, lectured for two hours then herded out so the next group could take their turn. We were even admonished for not appreciating the herding. Being told we could have just been told to stay home and online. I tried to appreciate it. I did. I just couldn't bring myself to like being given less. In fact, I hated it. I hated everything about this whole stupid situation. I hated being forced to cram and jam a year's worth of our course materials into two months. They hated the consistent sanitizing while worrying about being infected. School was now just another prison full of other unhappy prisoners. I had to just get through each day. I'm not sure I would have made it without the support of friends, family, and knowing that the entire world was probably going through the same thing. Thankfully, nearly two years later, there's a visible light to this journey, and things have grown more optimistic. The school days are now full days with sports and volunteering, but there's still an underlying scar from the experiences of the lockdown. I know that the experience will never be forgotten and we can never just go back to how things were. But we can heal and the scar will fade. Although I would rather none of the traumatic events had ever happened, they did, and I learned from that experience. I hope that others will as well.