The school year quietly ended as I turned in my last batch of work. There was no big send-off as a reward for getting through the year. It just ended. I was done with it. Besides a summer reading assignment that was due at the beginning of the next school year, I was free for the next few months. What did that really mean for me? I would get to do the same thing I would do whenever I was not doing any school work. Browse social media until I get bored, play games until 3 in the morning every night, have music play in the background constantly.

The summer of 2020 was even less defined than the school year that came before it. I genuinely do not think there was anything important that occurred in my life in that time period. I spent all of my time online doing anything I felt like. I think the most I did was occasionally walk down a dead end street across from my house. There is nothing at all that stands out to me from this. All I know is that my mental health did not improve. I had the same lazy and gross feeling that I had during school throughout the whole summer. I felt like I was wasting every single day even though that was my only choice. I was not satisfied with anything I was doing and I just felt disappointed. Every plan I made to go and hang out with my friends to distract myself would eventually fall apart and never happen. The summer of 2020 was a waste.

By the time I got to my freshman year of high school, I did not have my summer reading assignment done, which means I was already behind before the year even started. This year was quite different from the last. We were on a hybrid learning schedule for an undefined amount of the year. Students had the option of working virtually, which a few of my friends ended up doing. As for the rest, half the students would go Monday and Tuesday, the other half would go Thursday and Friday. It was separated by students’ last names in alphabetical order, so I ended up in the first half. On the days that I was not at school in person, I would have to complete work online. It seemed fine, having most of the week at home was a relief to someone who wasn’t very excited to be going back to school.

I started my first class of the day, physical science, unprepared. We began taking notes on the first day and I only brought a folder and a pencil with me. I did not have any paper to take notes on, and I managed to somehow get myself even more behind on work on the first day of school. As for the rest of the day, there was nothing important I could recall besides getting the news that the summer reading assignment wasn’t due on the first day. In fact, it was due the next week, which was a huge relief considering I hadn’t started reading the book until right before school started.

On my first virtual day, I began working on my assignment for physical science. Every assignment in that class was referred to as a “module”, and each module was split into a lab, which involved some experiment or activity that would either be done by the class or by the teacher. The other part of the module was answering questions about the unit and what topic the experiment was trying to teach us about. Although I can’t remember what the topic for the module was, I know my first module involved throwing a paper airplane for the lab. We technically did this on our first day in school. We all made the airplanes, then went outside, threw them, and collected information on them. My issue is that I wasn’t very satisfied with the data I got because I felt like I did the assignment incorrectly. I ended up redoing this section of the module in my driveway. The only issue was that it was windy. I kept waiting until the wind had stopped for a moment until I would throw the airplane. It took way longer than it should have.

Since it was the first week of school, I assume there wasn’t much online work to be done. But I can guarantee that I still managed to procrastinate on it. In fact, I can’t remember a single week of school where I had virtual days and I did not procrastinate at some point. This issue carried itself out for most of the year. I didn’t even start on my summer reading essay until the next week, and I ended up doing a majority of the work on the day the assignment was due.This was not a one time incident for me, I did this a lot.

When I was actually present in school, I would always get my work done. That was almost never an issue. Something about being there just kept me going. Being at home was a completely different experience. I wasn’t at school, I was at home. I couldn’t treat it like it was school. Every Wednesday, my first virtual day of the week, I would check all the work I had. I would decide that it wasn’t that much work, and I would push it off until later in the day or tomorrow. There was no schedule I had to follow, so I did everything on my own time. It wasn’t very efficient.

After a while, my mom had the idea of setting up alarms to make my virtual days run more like a normal school day. I would have a 45 minute timer, after that I would get a little break, and I would repeat that throughout the entire day until I ran through all my classes. I would go through all my classes in order and it would feel like a normal school day. The first day I did this, it actually worked really well. I managed to get work in some classes done for the whole week. This gave me more free time for Thursday and Friday. That was probably the most productive virtual day I ever had. I kept up with it somewhat for the rest of the week, but after that, I kinda lost it. I regret it, because it really did work the one time.

One important thing to mention is that for this year, I did all of my work in my dad’s office. I sat directly across from him at his desk. He would be there for a couple hours working from home but he would eventually have to leave. You think having supervision there would prevent me from putting off my work, but it did not do anything whatsoever. Every now and then, he would check and ask how I was doing on my work. In response, I would just shake my head. Both because I knew he would be disappointed, and because I was disappointed in myself.

At some point, my mom had me start work on virtual days at 7 in the morning every day. I did not have a very good sleep schedule. Every day at school, I would have trouble staying awake. Almost every first period, I remember doing the thing where you start falling asleep and then jolting awake for the entire period. That would carry out for the next several periods. I could just not get myself to sleep at the time I wanted to. I wasn’t tired. On virtual days, it was even worse. Knowing I would be at home the next day gave me a reason to stay up longer. I still had to wake up at 7. My mom put that rule in place expecting that I would start on my work immediately. Of course, I was so exhausted and tired every morning that I would wait to start on my work. It would be hours after I woke up that I would actually begin doing my work.

Once again, my mental health was obviously not improving. It might have actually been getting worse. Consistently not getting enough sleep every night made me tired and moody. Not being at school physically gave me no motivation to complete my work quickly. I moved very slowly through all of it and it made me stressed all the time. That’s one of the biggest things I remember from this time of my life. The amount of stress I felt every day trying to get through school. Due to my poor performance during virtual days, I would wake up every Monday freaking out about returning to school and completely dreading it. My virtual work days were always so long because I would tell myself I would get a certain amount of assignments done in a day but I would get distracted. This led me to having my assignments open on my computer for hours at a time, completely ignoring them and doing other things instead that weren’t productive. At midnight, I would finally give up, feeling extremely disappointed in myself.

I managed to pull through and I eventually found myself in winter break. Looking back to try and find information for this, I don’t think I did much during this break. The most I did was go to a friend’s house one night. Of course, I also had plans for New Year’s. I went to my brother’s house where I was accompanied by my 2 brothers and sister-in-law. We played the game “Rock Band” for hours. My favorite part was after midnight, where we played “Cards Against Humanity” until 4 in the morning. It’s a night I look back upon very fondly. Overall, the winter break of 2020 was not that bad for me. It was deserved after the trouble I went through in my school year so far.

February 21st, 2021. Every Sunday, my parents and I go to my brother’s house after church for lunch and dinner. We make the food at lunch time, which for some reason always ends up being way later than it should, and then we have the leftovers at dinner. I’m not a huge fan of these because I find it hard to fit myself into conversations because everyone else is either a lot older than me, or too young for me to really get along with. I get annoyed by kids easily. It was a very normal Sunday, everything went as it had gone every other Sunday. We finally left the house around 10, which personally I think is way too late, but I had no control over it.

I’m going to try and not get too specific on the details of what happened next given the subject matter and for the sake of privacy, but I’m going to try and give enough to tell the full story.

On the drive back home, my mom receives a call from my cousin on her side of the family. She let the call go to voicemail and didn’t think much of it. We pulled in the driveway, and as we were getting out of the car, she received another call from the same person. She answers the call and I continue heading for the door. That’s when I heard my mother let out a loud yell. I still get worried whenever I hear my mom make loud noises similar to that. Most of the time, she’s laughing, but I’m worried that something terrible has happened. I knew something was wrong. She began crying immediately. We had received some very bad news regarding my aunt. My mom’s sister. Life-threatening. We were only in the house for a short period of time. We immediately went back to the car and headed towards my aunt’s house. 

The sound of my mom crying filled my ears. It was the only thing I could hear. I was panicking. Too much was happening at once. I text my brother and ask if I could go back to his house. I couldn’t handle going to my aunt’s house given the current circumstances. I was scared. Eventually, my dad received a call from my cousin. My mom starts asking him what’s happening. The call ends and my dad is silent for what feels like an eternity as my mom is very audibly distraught. He breaks his silence by quietly stating, “Honey, she’s gone”. My mom becomes even more upset. My heart drops. It’s too much. How did everything go wrong at once?

My dad decided we should head back to my brother’s house. It was the best choice. I was slightly relieved but it still was not enough. Everything had already gone wrong. We arrived and one of my other cousins was there as well. We all sat around in a circle in the living room and talked about her life. The mood of the night had changed to a more positive tone, but the thought was still in the back of my head. Eventually, around maybe 1 in the morning. We went back to our house. At the end of the night, all of us were left with more questions than answers, and we still haven’t resolved any of them.

Considering the circumstances, I obviously wasn’t going to be attending school on Monday. I needed to get sleep and I needed a day to recollect myself. My dad called the school and informed them of the situation. After the call ended, he got back to me and said they decided it would be best if I took the week off from school. I wasn’t expecting it, but I guess it made sense. Maybe it was a good idea to take this time to reset. Of course, I did not use this time to get any work done. I’m pretty sure I was expected to, but I couldn’t get myself to do it. I didn’t feel right. I wasn’t necessarily sad about my aunt’s death. Somehow that didn’t bother me alone. It was just very jarring. Everything felt different. I was worried about my mom. She’s the youngest out of many siblings, so over the years she has lost many of them. This one that we just lost happened to be one of the ones she was closest to in recent years, so of course I was worried for her.

When Monday came around the next week, I began getting ready to return to school. I got completely ready and I could’ve gone back. I was just stressed out of my mind. I finished getting ready and just broke down. My parents could already tell that I was worried about going back, and my dad suggested I stay home another day. I began crying immediately, explaining that I couldn’t hide anymore. I needed to go back and continue working. I obviously wasn’t mentally stable enough at the time to accomplish that, but that was my mindset. I couldn’t keep delaying the return to school. But my dad convinced me, and I stayed one more day.

It was difficult returning to school after missing 6 whole days. I was terrified the teacher’s would be difficult with me about my work, but they all seemed to be understanding of my situation. Still, I struggled with getting all of my absent work done. All of these assignments were behind me and I didn’t have the motivation to get them done. Missing the past week was basically a complete reset of all of the progress I had made so far in the new semester. From what I remember, it took me a while to catch up. I remember several weekends, I would sit myself down with all my work and try to finish it to have it ready for Monday. I would lock up. Seeing all the work was so overwhelming and I didn’t understand what to do for assignments because I missed class. I would cry nonstop for hours staring at all the work I couldn’t get myself to complete feeling overwhelmed and stressed and scared and disappointed and tired. I can’t say I was back to where I had started, because everything had only gotten worse than it was before.

I was a mess for the rest of the school year. I managed to barely get by with some decent grades. I somehow pulled through and got an incredibly high score on my math state test besides that being one of my least favorite classes that year. I guess it wasn’t entirely bad. My suffering was over. I started moving to a completely new friend group around this time, which I think was very much needed. I was just losing connection with my last group of friends, and I was able to relate with these ones more. It was probably one of the better things to come out of this time. I had done it. The hardest school year of my life, finally over.

The first part of the summer of 2021 was good enough for what it was. I talked with my new group of friends for a decent part of it. I only went out with them once or twice but it was a very fun time. Besides that, I basically did the same thing I did every other summer. I sat in my room doing whatever, but I think overall I felt somewhat better mentally. Then at some point during the summer, my parents bought a house. They had been trying for months but the housing market was insane at the time. We finally managed to get one. It was much nicer than our old house, and I wouldn’t have to live in the attic with no air conditioning anymore. My room would be slightly smaller, but overall, this house seemed perfect. We moved in over the course of several days. Moving stuff out of my old room was awful. We moved the fan and AC out of the room and it was incredibly hot. I was sweating the whole time and I think I got a few spider bites. But it was worth it.

The school year was approaching, but there was something else I needed to get through. The new marching band season was starting. I planned on joining the band last year, but due to COVID, there was no marching band season in 2020. I was very scared. Besides a handful of people, I knew basically no one. The past couple years, I attended 7-Up nights, which were days you got to try out what marching band was like before you decided whether to join or not. They were very intimidating, but I was interested in joining. Plus, they count for both your community service hours and PE credits, so it just seemed like a good idea.

For me, the season started with rookie camp. It was a few days the week before the actual band camp started that were meant mainly for the rookies. They were only a few hours, and they went over the basics. Once the initial anxiety wore off, they weren’t that bad. But starting the next week, it was a whole different beast. For the next 2 weeks, there was practice Monday through Friday from 8 in the morning to 5 in the evening. Surprisingly, easier and more enjoyable than you would expect them to be. The first half of the day was split between exercises right at the beginning and practicing proper technique for the rest. The technique part was probably my least favorite part of the day as it was very tedious. After 4 hours, there was an hour of lunch, which was the longest break you would get all day. This was the time I got to get closer to some of the people outside of my section. This is where I got closer to my real proper friend group which I still have to this day. I am very thankful. Then for the rest of the day, part of it would be spent on sectionals. This was the time where each section, mine being the saxophones, would go off into some part of the school and begin practicing the music for the show we had for the year and music to play in the stands. The rest of the time was when we started actually practicing the show. This is where the marching comes into play. We had to memorize the whole show. Where we stood on the field, where we marched, how many steps to take up to that spot, visual elements, and playing the music while doing all of this. Luckily, at the beginning of the season, this started off very simple.

The first week of marching band was a positive experience. I rather enjoyed myself and was looking forward to the next week. Unfortunately, my grandma actually scheduled our family vacation for that week. So during that whole week of 9 hour practices, I actually spent all of my time in a beach house in Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina. Not the worst place to be spending my time instead. I was a bit worried about all the practice I would be missing, but it was out of my hands. The weekend had been planned months prior. Overall, it was quite enjoyable. For the most part, I spent a lot of time up in my room listening to the Beach Boys. I’m not that big of a fan of the actual beach, so I recreated the atmosphere in my room. At the end of every night, we would all spend our time out on the porch and drink whatever non-alcoholic sparkling beverage we bought for the night. It was a rather enjoyable experience.

After that week, the school year was starting again. I was nervous once again, but I didn’t feel awful. My few days were not that bad, but I soon realized after 3 days that I was missing a science class on my schedule. The school sorta screwed me over with my schedule. Before I moved, my dad made sure with the school that I would be guaranteed open enrollment, which they promised. After moving, we received a letter in the mall stating I was denied open enrollment. One angry phone call later, and I was back to attending Shawnee High School. When I went to retrieve my schedule from the school, they did not have one made for me, which I think is most likely due to them only recently approving me for open enrollment. They made the schedule at the last minute, and as a result I was missing biology and had to request to slightly adjust my schedule to have biology. Due to this little mistake, I was already behind on work in class. That wasn’t even my fault. Something that was my fault, however, was that I hadn’t finished my brand new summer reading assignment for this year. This was something I once again finished last minute. I might have even turned it in late.

Despite all of this, I didn’t feel too bad. I was only a little stressed having to keep up with both work and marching band at the same time, but it wasn’t bad. I managed to keep up until around the end of August. It was a Friday and I was to be staying after school to go to my second football game with the marching band. This would have been the first away game in the season and I was feeling excited. But I also felt a little bit off. At the end of the day, I made a last minute decision and asked if I could stay home for this game. The next day I visited an urgent care and by the end of the day, I received positive test results for COVID-19. Of course, something just had to come around and ruin all my progress for the year. I was now stuck in my room for the week. 

I didn’t do much. I couldn’t leave my room very often. My brother is prone to disease so I did not see him that entire week. I was only allowed in my bedroom and my parents’ bathroom. My parents would bring in my meals for me when I was hungry. That is the most contact I had with my family. I didn’t get much time to talk to my friends. They still had to go to school and attend marching band practice. I was basically stranded. Every day I got up and tried to do work, but I was so exhausted I couldn’t get myself to do anything. I would just go back to sleep. I guess I had good reason to not be keeping up with my work, but I still felt bad about it. To sum up my quarantine, I do not recommend getting COVID-19.

I was officially allowed back into school. My stress levels were back up to the top. Keeping up with current school work while also completing absent work while attending every marching band practice was a lot. I was barely into the new school year but I was once again screwed over. I won’t repeat myself again, so all I will say is that it was difficult. I managed to catch up on my school work. I managed to catch up on parts of the marching band show that I missed and I was even doing better than some of my peers. We went to our first competition and scored a 2, or “excellent”. It was better than what any of us were expecting, and from that point forward, marching band was taken more seriously. Things were starting to look up again, but it wouldn’t last for long.

Now’s the time to mention something important that I haven’t talked about yet. When I was 4 or 5, I got a dog. A miniature dachshund which my mom named Dexter. This guy had been around for a majority of my life. In recent years, his physical health condition had been getting worse. Years ago, we had a scare when he ate mouse poison and we had to take him to the vet. He made a recovery and he was better than ever. But now, he was getting old. At some point, he grew a hernia in an area that prevented him from going to the bathroom. He was taken to the vet a few times for this so it could be emptied. Sadly, getting him taken to the vet regularly to get this process done would be expensive. The doctor decided it would be a better idea to put him done rather than have him go through this painful process all the time.

His date was scheduled for the evening of October 11th, 2021. It was a Monday, and I had school. I went through the entire day knowing what I was in for when I went home. The school day ended. My parents and I crowded around Dexter on the floor. We all played with him for a bit. We were all crying. We all knew what was going to happen to him. He didn’t deserve it. He was just a little guy, and he was still full of life. Sometimes I would still run around the house despite his condition. We took him for his final walk outside our house. After reaching the end of the street, he tried going to the bathroom. A sad reminder of the reason he’s going to the vet today. We took him back to the house and continued playing with him for a bit. He spent his final moments very visibly happy. We then took him to the vet. We sat in the car with him and the vet brought out the first dose of anesthesia. My mom held him as the drug kicked in. As the effects worked their way through his body, he was stuck. His eyes open, making eye contact with my mom. After a few minutes, the vet came back out and took him into the building. My body was exhausted from the nonstop crying, but the process was finally over. I went home.

I had to move on. I still had work to get done and I still had to finish the marching band season. Luckily the season was close to done, but there was work to be done. We wanted to make it to the state competition. In order to qualify, we had to get a score of 1 at a normal competition. We finally managed to receive a 1 at our last competition, which is the one held at our own school. Everyone in the band agreed we did better at the previous competition, but we were all glad we made it to state. We went from trying to have fun at the beginning of the season to pushing through and aiming for state by the end. And we had made it.

Our state competition was on October 31st. We arrived at school early in the morning on the weekend. We practiced on the football field, in comparison to usually practicing on the practice field in another part of the school yard. After a few hours, we left to head to the stadium where the competition was being held. We arrived at the stadium and we began getting dressed. We practiced for a short period of time and headed to the field to give our final performance. I was nervous, but not to a huge extent. I believed we were capable of a really good performance. The conductor counted us off and the show started. By the end, besides one little mistake, I felt good enough about the performance, and so did the rest of the band. We went back to the bus, changed our clothes, and sat in the stands and watched the rest of the shows. We then eagerly waited for the results. The announcer came over the speakers and began giving off the results in order of performance. They came around to us. We got a 1. There’s a video out there where in the background, you can see where our band was sitting up in the stands. As they announced our score, we all stood up in unison and screamed. All our hard work had gotten us to this moment, and it paid off. We all got the win we all desperately needed. The superior rating. Looking back on it, I believe it to be one of my finest achievements of the past 2 years.

The marching band season was basically over with the competition. There were a few performances here and there, but everyone knew it was basically done. We had achieved our goal we’d been working on for the past several months. From that point on, all I had to worry about was finishing all my school work until the winter break came. There weren’t any important events I had to worry about besides getting to the break. For the most part, I was able to catch myself up. I did well enough on the exams. I was doing good. I was ready for break.

The break was alright. I only went out one time with some friends when I got to see the latest Spider-Man movie. I had a lot of fun though. My biggest source of stress was trying to make plans for New Year’s. As the days went by, I found out that none of my friends would be able to do anything. My parents were going to be out of town and my brother was going to be doing stuff with friends. I 100% believed I was going to be going into the new year completely alone in my house. At the last minute, my oldest brother came over and asked to go on a bike ride. We rode on the trail for about 2 hours. After returning home, we went out to eat, and then stayed home the rest of the night. We watched dumb videos until midnight, and then he left around 1 in the morning. Despite it not being the huge event I was hoping it would be, I’m glad he came over.

I’ve now reached the present day. To summarize, I started the second semester of this year being able to keep up with all my work. A couple weeks in, I unfortunately got sick with such a bad case of strep throat that I had to get a steroid shot in my rear to treat it. This led to me missing 3 days of school, which happened to be a time where many important assignments were being given, such as the one that has led me to write this project. 2 weeks later, I woke up Monday morning with a rash all over my body that caused me to miss 1 more day of school. As a result, I have been struggling to keep up with work since then. If it tells you anything, I wrote half of this assignment in one day.

Now that I’m all caught up on my life events, what have I learned? Well, not really anything. I’m still falling into the same old habits that I have been for the past 2 years. Is this a bad thing? I mean, yeah. You think by this point I would have figured myself out and I would be on top of things, but I’m really not. That might seem sad, but that’s just the way it is. But once I get caught up with everything, I should be able to do well in school for the rest of this year. After that, I have many things to look forward to. My friend group has grown in the last year, and that means I’ll be able to go out more during the summer. I also have a new marching band season to look forward to near the end of the summer. I’m getting one of my friends to join and I’m really excited about it. I think I have good things coming to me in the future.