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Think back to when you were a teenager and cared more about your friends than anything else, family included. Imagine how you would feel if one day, with no warning, you lost your friends, your exams, your clubs, your world… and there was no clear date for you to get them back.
Imagine how you would feel if during this period, you were told it was selfish, wrong and killing people to meet your friends, want to see them or even be upset at having lost everything. Imagine people telling you that this was worth it, good even, as it was protecting a very small group of people from a virus that doesn’t affect you. Imagine having to start every day copying an irritating hipster doing a workout until you want to rip out your eyeballs! Imagine spending months wanting school to open just so you can un-cancel your life.
And then school doesopen, but only for small groups at a time. You go in on your day and spot the head and his friends standing outside school roaring “TWO METRES!” at everyone. You’re told to get a mask. You do so overly aggressively, spilling masks all over the floor. You then try to sanitise your hands, but the sanitiser explodes out of the bottle like a volcano, all over the masks on the floor.
You follow social distancing spots into a classroom where you’re going to be doing online work, where you’re instructed to sit in a little box they’ve made on the floor out of social distancing tape.
You’re told not to leave your box. You try and do a maths test, but you’re too angry. You walk out after an hour. You don’t go in again until September, when the thing you’ve wanted for half a year happens: school opens. Well, hell opens.
Imagine walking down your school corridor, but add these changes. This corridor has one way system arrows on the floor and “hands face space” posters covering every inch of the wall that isn’t taken up by social distancing posters. Everyone is in masks. Imagine teachers literally yelling and screaming like tantruming toddlers at everyone for so much as smiling at someone in another year group or for hugging, or until recently, for breathing freely.
Imagine these teachers doing more than just telling off- pressing in on the students and putting their face against them as they yell, telling them that they’re a selfish murderer for doing whatever they did.
Imagine being kept in one area during breaks to avoid “mixing bubbles”. Yours is the maths classrooms for some reason. When your year has the most cases, you’re told that you now have to face the wall during breaks. You can’t turn your head to speak to anyone. So you sit staring ahead while a teacher screams at you all about how awful you all are for having the ability to spread disease.
Imagine watching your friends’ response to this. A lot of them were struggling with mental health before, but this is a new matter. Imagine being with your friends, but each one of them is either crying, has their head down on a table, is silent or is staring at their phone. The only exception to any of this is the couple in the friendship group, but they’re just glued at the lips in a vomit-inducing manner.
Normally you can help your friends when they’re like this, but now you can’t. You watch them crying, see the circles under their eyes, see how much they’re shaking with anxieties, and there’s pretty much nothing you can do. And every day you see people saying that teenagers are fine, they don’t care, they’ll bounce back. Bounce back? Do they think you’re some kind of hormonal yoyo?
You have nothing. Your friends are mentally gone, your school is like a daily prison, the places you went to escape problems with school before are so bad it’s not worth going. That is, the ones that don’t view zoom as an adequate alternative. You’re furious and you can’t carry on and then school shuts again.
You’re absolutely fed up with home. You need to grow away from your family, but you can’t when you’re stuck playing board games with them. But this is when you totally break. You used to be furious and sad, but now you feel nothing. You’re not sure which is worse. Your emotions only return when they announce that masks will be worn permanently.
This isn’t a minor inconvenience. It’s the worst 11 weeks you can ever remember. Every day school is silent as no one talks anymore. Everyone is depressed, anxious and barely have the will to talk. You’re exempt so you feel fine, but no one else does. You’re really lonely. And the teachers are even worse than usual.
Lessons are full of shouts and screams about how many teachers’ lives you’re risking. You’d be more inclined to believe that if the teacher who informed you that you were “breathing in my breathing space and putting me at risk” wasn’t young, slim, healthy and says she has no underlying conditions.
Every day is like a punishment for breathing. You go in, get screamed at, sometimes laugh at something or have a brief word with a friend in another year, attempt to help a friend having a breakdown, wave your exemption card at an indignant teacher and accidentally let go of it and watch it hit someone in the face, then go home and try to get ready to go in again. Some days you pick fights with bullies purely so you can have a conversation with someone.
Imagine it’s your last day of year eleven. It’s the end of the day and everyone is crying, partly because we’re leaving, but mainly because it’s just the awfulness of the last year coming out at once. You aren’t crying because you’re so relieved that this nightmare is finally done. You leave early to avoid having to swim out through the rapidly forming lake of tears, and you see one of your best friends standing by one of the gates.
You start to go over to them, then change your mind and leave by the other exit because they’re in another year group and there’s loads of teachers watching you walking over to them, gearing up for a shout. So you avoid your friend so you don’t have to end your five years with a fight. Your friend doesn’t see you.
Where are you leaving? It’s not a school. Where are you going? Your house isn’t your home. Where can you go? Nowhere. What have you got? Nothing except yourself. Is this worth it? No.
WHAT ARE THEY DOING TO YOU?
https://covidiotsinquaranteen.wordpress.com/2021/06/12/imagine/