I spent the first semester of school online. At the beginning it went decently well. I always got my tasks done and I was ready for class. I enjoyed staying at home and being free to roam around while still paying attention to class. Going to school online let me have extra time with my pets and made it easier to complete chores around the house. I rarely needed to stay up late to complete extra homework since most of it was classwork.

At some point, things started to take a turn. I would start waking up at 9:08 when classes started at 9:10. Instead of sitting at a desk or being in a bright area for school, I laid in bed and kept my lights off. Sometimes I would end up falling asleep in class and I would wake up being late for my next period. My missing assignments started racking up. I would stay up until 3am trying to complete any work possible to bring my grades up.

When I started doing bad in school, it affected my personal life too. I didn’t eat much and rarely left my room. Whenever I did leave it was only for short periods of time. It even went as far as not leaving my house for a whole month because I just couldn’t bring myself to do anything.

For the second semester, many people that I went to online school with decided to go face-to-face. It was about a week into the second semester when I got a FaceTime call from one of my best friends that decided to go to school in person. It was lunchtime, but I was sitting alone in my room in the dark. She was outside and talking with other people and laughing. She seemed so happy to be back with other people that I couldn’t help but crave that too.

I convinced my mom to email the school to see if they could possibly give me the chance to go face-to-face even though I had missed the deadline to fill out that form.

I’ve never been a morning person but with the state I was in, I was willing to wake up early just to get some sort of human interaction. There was an immediate shift in my mood and attitude during my first week back. I was happy with the classes I had and glad I could spend time with people.