Murrieta, CA:

My perspective of this current situation has changed completely with the changing of the times. In the beginning, I thought, like everybody else, that this quarantine would only last a most a month and we would be back in school and back to the normality of life. After a few months of the lockdown, and looking at the people in power’s message about the virus and I then understood that this would take a while. 80% of my day is spent in my house, I only leave for baseball practice for two hours maximum of two days a week. This situation affects my mental health in extreme ways. My brain is longing for the social connections that school and the freedoms that turning 16 brings me. I cannot exercise the things that I have waited for so long in terms of life and friends because of the people in power and the people that cannot follow simple directions. The situation of everything causes me to either constantly be extremely upset or irritable almost every day. The general rules that are put into place where I live are the standards put up by the business owners that run the shops within my small city. Most of my day is spent playing video games and wasting the time that I could have spent doing things that could help either my graduation status or my position in college applications. The very little amount of schooling that I receive is done very poorly from the logistics standpoint of my school. They leave us basically to learn the material for ourselves. My perspective of this entire quarantine has been limited to frustration and helplessness about everyone and everything around me.