K.D., a teen in Murrieta, CA

Murrieta, CA:

Life in quarantine has been quite difficult to handle for me personally. I am fortunate that I play a support that is very contact free, golf, and so I can continue to play my sport during lockdown. With the ability to go outside and play my sport, as I previously took for granted, I now can see how important it is to have an outlet, or a way to disconnect from my surroundings of devices and constant noise. The ability to destress in a calm, focused environment does wonders for the human mind and concentration, especially for things like homework. With school work, it has been especially difficult to remain focused in the environment I have to work in as we do online school. I am constantly surrounded by distractions, and background noise as my family works or moves around while I am trying to take a test or finish homework. Quarantine has greatly decreased my work efficiency as I find it hard to remain focused and work as efficiently as I used to when school was in person. Sometimes there is a benefit to staying home, such as having more freedom to move around during class as I can log into class on my phone, similar to being in two places at the same time. However, I think that having school in person has larger benefits than the perks of schooling at home. I am hopeful that soon we will be able to go back to school completely normally. One interesting thing I noticed during quarantine is the development of online shopping, especially in my own life and with my family. I have changed to sometimes prefer online shopping as opposed to shopping inside of stores because of convenience. I still think it is nice though, to be able to physically try on clothes and such, which is definitely a large benefit to in person shopping that is unavailable to online shopping. Quarantine has definitely changed many aspects of my life and how my perspective.