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  2020-08-23

  Having No Mouth

  My story of the Quarantine is that initially I was kind of excited about the prospect of having an excuse to stay indoors. This is due to the fact that I am a homebody and would rather chill with my friends rather than go to parties. However, one thing that I did not think of was that not only would I be staying home most of the time, but a majority of the rest of my family would as well. When I was younger, having everyone home was not a problem, but now we are all grown up, and we all need our space. Due to Quarantine, getting that space that I wanted was rather hard. It felt like I was having a hard time being able to be alone without someone hearing what I was saying. Not only that, but it was also hard because the conflicts in my family came to become more and more prevalent/ This is due to the fact that things like the college process and transitioning from high school to college seemed to have been made a lot harder. Instead of this Summer being relaxing and giving me room to breathe, it was made into one of the hardest times of my life. The short story titled "I Have Mouth, and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison captures how I felt during the pandemic. In the story, the characters are trapped underground and are totally helpless to the situation that they find themselves in. In many ways, I felt almost the same way to these characters. I felt like I was trapped in a place that I felt as though I had no control over anything because it was not my domain. Like the narrator of the story, I too felt as though I had no mouth by the end of it all. This is due to the fact that I am not the best at standing up for myself or handling conflicts. Not only that, but I feel like whenever I would try to argue my point, I always felt like nothing would happen. Even if anything did happen that went my way, it always felt like it was not enough to feel like a victory. By the end, it would just reinforce my unwillingness to speak up for myself or to just let things go and allow them to continue. I hope that I will be able to improve things once my time at Suffolk starts and when this Quarantine ends.