Collected Item: “No Longer Empty, But Not Yet Normal”
Give your story a title.
No Longer Empty, But Not Yet Normal
What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?
Photograph
Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.
I was halfway through my freshman year of high school when COVID hit, and I’m now halfway through my junior year, and things are better, but they still aren't how they used to be. This screenshot of an empty Dodger Stadium is much like how school and life was then and is now. When school shut down 2 years ago, so did my baseball team. What was a great group of guys who had a good chance to have an amazing season turned into a dejected group who met daily on Zoom to do pushups in our bedrooms. We’re back to practicing and playing, but a lot of the players from my freshman year didn’t return, and we’ll never know what kind season we could have had. I was lucky that my school gave me the option to return at the end of my sophomore year, and I took it. I was back in school, yet it still felt so empty. I was one of the very few who went back, so each of my classes had no more than two or three other students besides me; and we were still on Zoom, so I had little more opportunity for socializing than I did back at home in my room. Now this year everyone is back, thankfully, and Zoom is no longer a daily part of my life. Yet the classrooms still feel empty like this Dodger stadium picture. Everyone wears a mask and I hardly know what any of my classmates or teachers look like; I haven’t seen the full faces of my teachers for 2 years. I have to say I feel lucky and thankful that my family and I have been kept safe from COVID, but I still feel like I’ve missed out on some of the best years of my young life. I hope that soon vaccines will be mandated and we can all return to school with no masks, and a sense of normalcy that doesn’t feel as empty as Dodger stadium will return.
Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?
#APUSH, #GardenGroveHighSchool
Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)
Los Angeles Dodgers
Give this story a date.
2021-11-28