My Quarantine Summer

By: Katie Lindsay

If you’d been asked a year ago what your summer would be like or what you’d be doing right now, your answer would probably be very different from what you’ve been doing for the past eight months. 

So we are in quarantine which means: can’t go to school, can’t see friends, and can’t do anything with people you don’t live with. It sounds kinda depressing, and for a while it felt that way, too. Going that long without seeing my friends, teachers, and even people who I am not necessarily friends with is really hard. To be honest I began to miss everyone, and everything. 

After about a month, everyone (or at least everyone I have talked to) had this weird burst of productivity and were on top of everything. All of my homework was done, my room was unusually clean, I organized everything, and for some reason I felt the need to move furniture. At the time, this was really good, and I thought I’d be this uber productive person for all of quarantine, and that not having to worry about social gatherings and everything “extra” and “unnecessary” would make me a more productive person in general. Yeah, it didn’t really work out that way.

So at this point, we’ve gone through the sad and the productive part of quarantine;, who knew there would be another sad part? I think that a portion of this was the fact that I was so burnt out from being unusually productive or just the fact that I was in quarantine. But I got so bored with life and felt extremely isolated pretty much all the time. It really seemed like the world was ending, and having school kind of winding down didn’t really help. I didn’t have much to fill my days with and having access to so many online streaming services didn’t help either. Having that many hours of entertainment at my fingertips made it so easy for me to not do anything except watch a million shows, movies, YouTube videos, pretty much whatever you can think of. Thinking back on it, it’s really gross to realize how I would not do anything productive or good for me. This time period was relatively short but it being at the very beginning of summer made it feel so much longer then it actually was.

I was really disappointed about summer because I had all these big plans about what I wanted to do, and I just had to sit back and watch them all be wrecked. In the heat of the moment it really felt like the end of the world. I know looking back you’d like to think that you aren’t a superficial person who cares so much about activities and random things like going to an amusement park, but we can’t always be like that. 

Even small little plans that seem so minuscule in the grand scheme of things turn out to be the ones that impact you most when they can’t happen. They seem so reliable because not much goes into it, then they get destroyed. It was really hard for me to even wake up in the morning. I didn’t have anything to do and not just the normal nothing to do type of summer, where you still go out, travel, or go to camps. It was worse; not only did I not have any school work but I couldn’t do any of the things I listed just now.

After about a month of summer I was so done with it, I actually wished school would start again, which is extremely out of character for me. Then something happened that changed everything: I got a skateboard. I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it gave me something to do for hours at a time, and I would skate everyday. This also gave me a mode of transportation so I didn’t have to rely on someone to drive me, I mean I couldn’t go far but I could go far enough.

Being able to get around by myself gave me a sense of freedom that I had lost because of everything that was happening. Generally this made me so much happier, I could pretty much go anywhere around my town. Making that first step into having a happy summer made it so much easier to go the rest of the way. I spent most of my summer either swimming at my neighbors house or skateboarding just around my town.

I know that what's happening right now and has been happening is unexpected and really scary at times, but you have to remember that even though we all thought that it would be over in a few weeks and it has been way longer than that, it will eventually end. I can’t really tell you when, but it will. I know first hand that it can be really hard to stay optimistic and keep your spirits up all the time and that's completely fine; no ones always going to be happy and be perfectly hopeful. But when you aren’t feeling the greatest about the current situation, you just have to remember that it's going to be over and just because stuff got canceled doesn’t mean your life is over. You may never get those exact experiences that you missed out on back, but dwelling on what could have been won’t help anybody especially yourself.