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Activities that young people previously relied on for stability and joy have been disrupted. After-school clubs and birthdays are mostly canceled. The same goes for rites of passage like the graduation party and homecoming. Students spend a large part of their weeks looking at the Zoom screens. Without school events and traditions to plan for, many report having difficulty getting up in the morning.
“Everything is stagnant now,” said Ayden Hufford, 15, a sophomore high school student in Rye, a suburb in upstate New York, whose school has now mixed in-person and distance learning. “There is nothing to hope for. On virtual days, I sit at the computer for three hours, eat lunch, walk around a bit, sit for three hours, and then end my day. It’s just a cycle. “
Ayden identifies as a passionate “theater boy” and looks forward to his school play and the Science Olympiad. With those out of the question now, he turned to a recent online meeting for the Student Leadership Council for inspiration. But it turned out to be demoralizing as he struggled to stay engaged in the Zoom conversation.
“I lay down with my camera turned off and waited for it to be over,” he said. “It’s sad and somewhat lonely.” And he added that it was almost impossible to form new relationships with classmates in a virtual environment: “Unless you try extremely hard, there is no chance of making new friends this year. “
Isolation has been particularly difficult for young adults who suffer from chronic anxiety or depression and who generally rely on their social circles for their comfort. Nicole DiMaio, who recently turned 19, has been developing techniques to deal with her anxiety over the years. She talks to friends, hugs her mother, exercises, and reads books – so much that her family calls her Princess Belle, as the protagonist of “Beauty and the Beast”. But nothing seemed to work during the first months of the pandemic.
Nicole’s mother fell ill with Covid in late March after treating a coronavirus patient at Coney Island Hospital, where she works as a nurse. Nicole became the guardian of her mother and her family. She would wake up every day at 5 a.m. to clean the house, watch over her little sister, and cook protein-rich foods, which she left outside her mother’s bedroom door, while doing her homework. Her mother didn’t want to be ventilated if her lungs broke down, so whenever she went to the emergency room for treatment, Nicole feared she would never come back.
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