blog entry 5

i know so many people experienced such extreme lows during the initial lockdown in march of 2020, but i like to think covid didn't affect me. 

it was my freshman year of high school, i was fifteen, we had our january midterms and the cheer season came to a natural end in february. i knew the national quarantine was coming since the end of december, no one believed me back then, of course, but i wasn't suprised when it happened. there wasn't really school until september, teacher's struggling to utilize zoom, but i tried to stay productive. 

i got a new membership for wizard101, my all time favorite game. i started playing for the first time in july of 2012, i was a life wizard. i lost my password at some point, leaving off on level thirty-two, back when dragonspyre was impossible to solo and the jonas brothers did something for grizzleheim, who knows what, though. i didn't try to recover the password, i made a new account on september 6, 2015, this time i was a death wizard. i played intermittently, reaching kroktopia when it kingsisle dropped the paywall on december 31 of the same year. i had always loved kroktopia, still do, even with the fourth arc in motion. in 2016 i played more regularly, with a membership, nightcore playing in the background, leaving off on level forty-eight. when i got my new membership in 2020, that's where i began again. i hit max level (140 at the time) by june. 

as you can imagine, i stopped talking to all of my friends entirely. i branched out online, met a bunch of people through instagram groupchats, some i still talk to today. i watched she-ra in may, glee in june, which i watched many, many, many more times before the year ended. i watched some other shows, got a summer job, but otherwise didn't do much. school was in-person in the fall, but i decided to go remote in december of 2020, in-person again only in september of 2021.

things change, people, places, and i studied, worked, did so many things, but i didn't. i didn't change at all. 

i turned seventeen three months ago and i still feel fifteen. i see people on the internet, on tiktok, with '15' in their bios, and in my head i think, "oh, they're the same age as me!" but they aren't. it has been two years since i was fifteen. 

i was told in eighth grade that high school goes by fast, but i didn't believe it. fifth through eighth grade, a four year period, felt so long to me. it was so long to me, but now i have five months to apply to college. i'll be a legal adult in nine months. i have a driver's license. i have a car. i've taken the SAT three times. i have prom in two weeks. 

i'm not scared for the future, but i'm scared of my past and the past everything is so quickly becoming. why does it feel like i'm wasting so much time? would high school still have felt so fast without the breaks in between? would i still feel like i wasted so much time? the answer is yes, probably. i know i haven't wasted my time, i know i'm working hard, i know my work is important, but it's not enough. i could have done more. i need more. but even if i had everything, would i still feel fifteen on my graduation day?