Not-So Normal Gave Me Normal
Life during the Pandemic (Quarantine)
One-year pandemic reflection? That is a lot to unpack. Overall, I would describe this year as a year of immense change and growth. As a girl who is used to being busy all of the time, my life completely changed. All I knew my entire life was dance. Dance and school. That was it. While my friends attended parties and sleepovers and had boyfriends and friend groups, I attended dance classes with my dance friends.
A little over a year ago, I had my Sweet 16 in February, and many friends of mine who attended refer to my party as “the best day of 2020” and “the last night of normal”. This was because soon after, everyone started talking about corona. We all thought it was a joke at first. When someone would sneeze or cough we would all laugh and say “it’s probably corona” because none of us thought it was real or realized how serious the virus truly was. When I heard school would be canceled for two weeks I was ecstatic and posted on social media about how I would be enjoying my “coronacation”.
While I loved the time off from in-person school, I had no idea the impact that quarantine would have on my mental health. At first, it was really hard to cope during quarantine because I was forced to sit with my trauma and had nothing to distract me from it. There were many nights I had breakdowns and wasn’t quite sure how to work through it. As a person who loves spending quality time with my loved ones, it was also really hard to not be able to see my close friends and family members. I eventually began to feel unmotivated and powerless with no sense of direction. Before the pandemic, I had been accomplishing so much in dance. Now that I wasn’t able to dance, it felt as if my world had been shattered. I began to question my dance abilities and felt like I had lost focus in my life since dance was all that I had known.
However, I ended up developing a small friend group that my mom allowed me to hang out with the entire summer. This was the first experience I had hanging out with friends outside of school regularly. While we had a lot of fun, we also had serious conversations and believed in important movements that landed us at multiple Black Lives Matter protests. Over the summer, I also got a job as a dance and cheer counselor at the YMCA which I loved. I realized how much I love working with kids which I wasn’t aware I had a passion for. Originally, I had to decline the job because I had a summer planned of dance intensives like I was used to having every summer. When those dance intensives had been canceled because of the pandemic, I was able to then take on the job at the YMCA. During my time off work, I was also able to go on a beach trip with friends of mine. This was the first time I ever had the availability to go to the beach with friends.
Ironically, the not-so-normal pandemic provided me with the opportunity to be “normal”. I got to experience normal teenage life which incorporated many ups and downs. I always felt like teenage experiences were distractions from my determination in dance, but I found that the more variety of life experiences I had contributed to my growth as a person and gave me new insight. When tasked with this assignment of writing a one-year pandemic reflection, I asked my mom what she thought I accomplished during this year and she said that she saw immense growth from me and that I matured a lot. It was interesting to me that having experiences I thought were “immature” or “not important” was extremely important and contributed so much to my maturity.
More recently, dance studios started opening back up and I auditioned at sixteen years old for an 18+ dance competition team and made it. It is the most amazing team that I have ever been a part of and the team truly feels like family. I’m so thankful for my life right now and I can’t believe I’m only a few months away from graduating a year early. I’m thankful for this year of personal growth and I’m excited to see where this next year takes me.
