Discovering my “New Normal”

A lot about my life has changed the past couple months, much like everyone's life has. The transition from normal life to quarantine life wasn’t easy for me, especially regarding school. I like school, I love to learn and see my friends, but being a junior in high school includes so much stress with SAT’s, ACT’s, IA’s, keeping a good GPA and college. There is so much you’re expected to do and figure out and now, all of the sudden, a global pandemic hits and we’re expected to control not only our normal stressful life, but the new online learning and general worry surrounding the state of the world.

I would consider myself an organized person and I have an awesome desk to work at in my room where it’s quiet, but most days when I sat down to do work it was nearly impossible to focus. I would stare at my computer screen and my mind would just go blank. Online learning is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do for school! Both my parents started working from home. When I couldn’t focus in my room, I started working in the dining room with my dad. Doing this provided a kinda classroom feeling for me. I am a very compartmentalized person, at home I relax, at school I work. Now it's all been mixed up together and moving past that took some time. I was more productive having another person in the room working with me, but it was still difficult. Because I found it difficult to focus, I don’t feel like I retained the information I was supposed to be learning. I’m worried that when I start this upcoming school year I won’t remember any of it.

I’ve said a lot about how hard online learning was, but there were some advantages. I liked being able to sleep in and fitting school into my schedule v.s. basing my schedule around school. My favorite part about it was deciding on my own time when to eat lunch. Sometimes at school I had to force feed myself lunch because I wasn’t hungry, but I knew I would be in the next hour when I wouldn’t be allowed to eat. I also appreciate being able to spend more time with my family. Everyone is normally so busy with work, school, and sports we really only saw each other for maybe an hour every night. Now we can do things together and see each other more and that’s meant a lot to me, especially since in a year I’ll be moving out to go to college.

I don’t like change in my personal life, it makes me feel out of control. I’m trying to stay focused on the nice changes over the more emotionally straining changes. While change is hard it doesn’t stay change forever. At some point it becomes the new normal and I’m starting to be okay with that.