2020: The Year of Isolation

          Covid year! This one was really weird and I’m gonna try and make it quick. The summer of 2019 was possibly the worst time of my life mentally. I was heartbroken, starting to gain a lot of weight, and alone because I had just moved to a brand new city in which I knew absolutely no one. As you can imagine, it was a very dark time for me.

          It’s always been hard for me to make friends because I never really had much time nor the confidence for it. Usually people grow up in one city around the same people for their whole lives up until they graduate from high school and move on to college. It wasn’t like that for me. I spent Kindergarten to 1st grade in one school. Then from 2nd to 4th in another. Then from 5th to 8th in another. Then I went into freshmen year to a high school that was outside of my school zone and with north of 4,000 students. It was hard finding an identity or any friends that would help form that identity cause it was pretty much always a new friend group every year. So I thought being in that high school would finally be a chance for me to break out of my shell and be someone. Then we had to move to a completely new city and all the progress I made that year was gone. Now I’m in this new city in a new school with around 2,000 students that have mostly grown up with each other their entire lives. And it’s Tallahassee so it has a completely different culture and atmosphere than Miami. In Miami, 99 in 100 people are some form of Latino born outside of the US or first-generation American citizens. Everyone speaks Spanish. It’s a culture. In Tallahassee, you have to look in crevices and corners to maybe find one Latino. If you speak Spanish up here, you’re considered a unicorn and people look at you differently. Sometimes positively but, in my experience, usually negative. So now I’m in this position where I can’t even be 100% myself to the people around me or they’ll look at me differently and not want to be friends with me. And I was also coming in as a sophomore so I couldn’t even really be friends with the freshmen cause they’re either looking for other new freshman friends or they already have other freshmen friends that they grew up with for their whole lives.

          All this to say that it was a very lonely year. I would usually eat alone in secluded places, watching a movie or a video on YouTube. Sometimes if someone took my usual spot, I would look for a new spot and eat there. If there were no empty spots, I would eat alone in the bathroom. It was a very low point for me. And this lasted for most of the school year up until March of 2020. Something happened, I’m not sure what, but we were sent home for a week. Right before my birthday! I was gonna spend my 16th birthday on break from school. What a blessing. After that week, they gave us another week. And then another week. And then… another week. It was great for me cause I got to stay home and play Fortnite in its prime with some friends at the time. But then they started giving us online assignments to do at home and… nobody doin that shit. I literally don’t think I ever submitted a single assignment. Like if I’m gonna be home, I’m not gonna do schoolwork and it’s just as simple as that. Thank God it was only a couple months and I already had decent grades from before lockdown so I kind of just coasted the rest of the year. It was great to not do work but I was missing the most important aspect of school: the social aspect. Meeting new people, growing from certain interactions and just being a better person. Like if you grew up homeschooled or in private school… lmao. Anyway, that reason is why I decided to return the physical school for the 2020-2021 school year; my junior year. I thought maybe I would actually have friends and stuff like that and grow or something but when I got to school on the first day, it was a ghost town. Most of the other kids decided to stay home, of course. It felt like only 19% of the school was actually there. I won’t get into too much but it was lonelier than last year. I was still eating alone but now there were even less people. Realistically the only thing I would like to mention from this year was that around November I started working out with the football team cause I needed a reason to start working out. It then kind of went on to me starting to practice with them and things of that nature.