When I was thinking about what to write for this blog my mind went right to how quarantine affects your mental health. You wouldn't really think much about this but it is important. Being in one place not allowed to leave on week’s end is really bad for you and can actually make you mentally ill. Quarantine has 3 major effects on your mind autonomy, competency and connectedness. This isolation we face today is making people feel like they are not in touch with the world because everything has shut down. It pretty much feels like you're trapped, you don't see as many people as you once did. The American Psychological Association says that feeling isolated can lead to poor sleep, depressive symptoms, manage your emotions etc. in the last quarantine 31.% of people had depressive symptoms. If you are feeling these symptoms you can find ways to manage your mental health, for example, you can google ways to help and try a whole bunch of different ones. Here let me google that for you.
Madison
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I honestly feel selfish. I feel selfish for continuously thinking about everything I am missing and the fact that I keep fucking crying over graduation. I feel like a horrible and ungrateful person for pitying myself for even one second when I am stuck in a nice house, surrounded by my family with food in our fridge and millions of things that I can do to keep busy. Thousands and thousands and thousands of people are dying and suffering around the world, and I can’t let it go that the end of my Grade 12 year has been ruined. This blog will probably make me sound like a horrible, pessimistic and self-centered person, but I need to write about it. Hopefully writing this blog will release a bit of tension that is causing me so much pain.
As we all know school has been suspended indefinitely due to COVID-19. But let’s face it; this school year is over. Coming to terms with this fact has been very difficult for me. If you know me then you know that I actually enjoy school because I get to hangout with my friends all day and all my teachers are great, I love my classes and I actually love learning new things. Ever since grade 8 I knew that I needed to cherish highschool because I knew that I would miss it once I graduated. So I tried to go into every day knowing that my days at SDSS were limited. But having the end of my graduation year suddenly be taken away and me being powerless against it makes me so fucking mad and so completely devastated. I've missed and will miss so many experiences in the next 2 months that I will never ever get the chance to do over. Last week we were told that the West Coast Trail trip is canceled. For people that don't know, the WCT is a 75km hike that the school gives grade 12 students the opportunity to go on. My older brother and cousin both did this and both said that it was the best part about each of their high school experiences. I’m not going to get the chance again to go on a week-long hike with friends and some other kids in grade 12 that I wanted to get to know better or the 4 great teachers that were going with us. That’s only one example of something amazing I will miss. Trying to suddenly come to terms with the fact that I won’t get the graduation I've been working hard for for the past 5 years and that I have been thinking about and looking forward to since I can remember is heartbreaking. Everyone obviously will have to deal with moving on from high school and looking forward into the future, and even if you don't actually like school there is still something sad and hard about saying goodbye to the last 5 years of your life and essentially some level of childhood. After high school you’re pushed into the beginning of the “real world”, and whatever that looks like for each person it can be scary. I knew that I would have a really hard time saying goodbye to high school in general but I also can’t properly say goodbye to teachers or friends and the people that I’ve grown up with that I know I probably see won’t again. No one knows what kind of graduation we will get, if we get one at all, and it’s frustrating because it’s absolutely nobody's fault. I actually originally had quite a different topic to talk about that I had set up for this blog and I’m not sure what the point of writing this was because there aren't any tips or whatever to help you grow as a leader, I guess this was just to rant and get it all out. But I will say this, something really important that everyone needs to hear and genuinely understand; take nothing for granted. The thing about taking things for granted is that you don’t realize it until it’s gone. I’m glad I never took high school for granted because I have loved and cherished every unforgetable moment, stupid decision, fucking useless math test and every horribly stressful time throughout my 5 years at SD. I can look back at my high school experience without any regret because even though I am missing the best parts, I know that I can’t do anything about it except instead to think of all the great things I’ve gotten the chance to do over the years of being a devil. This experience of losing something very important to me has made me grateful that I was always treasuring attending SD because I knew that I would miss it. If I hadn’t done that then this would seem more sudden than it already does and be a lot more painful. So take nothing for granted because you never know when something as crazy and random as a worldwide pandemic will come along and fuck things up. Stay healthy and safe xx Georgia F It's Wednesday morning, and I am waking up to an alarm that I would rather not be going off at all, it's like this. Even though I can Zoom, get a workout in, see the people that I see every week, my friends, the people that will never judge me, the people that will always lean in for a hug, it's not the same, it's like this. The sun that was here yesterday, making my room as warm as a blanket, has been replaced by a steady drizzle of water that drips slowly off of the side of my house. It builds into drops and then hangs ready to fall off the edge of my roof as slowly as some of the days have passed in the last month, it's like this.
I can't stand in front of my students talking about things that I love to share, I have to sit at my computer waiting for a notification that someone has done some tiny task that I can click a box to show that I know that they did it instead, it's like this. But I know that it's like this, I know that I can do what I can to become a better teacher while the day drags on. I can find things to make myself happy, to move forward with projects, to look forward to seeing my friends for boardgames on zoom. I know that I can learn new things and call people that I never had time to call before now I have all the time in the world because, well, it's like this. What we do have at our fingertips is a calm, slow-paced, small project-based world, where I have a job to do, tasks to complete, lawns to mow, toys to fix, and dinners to make. I have 170 students to care about, to worry about, to think about, to check in on because they are mine. It's like this being a teacher. It's like this now but it won't be this forever, it will go back to what it was and we will forget because that is what we do. So, for now, it might be hard but I know it will get better, and we can do this for a while, because for a while and only a while, it's like this. Richard Hortness |
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