A Gray Mourning by Caroline Lloyd-Jones (16, Illinois)

“Get ready for some of the best years of your life!” The microphone echoed in the humid auditorium, the large crowd applauding and cheering as the Principal stepped down from the podium. The last words spoken at my eighth-grade graduation fluttered in the golden air, filling each student with a glowing hope for the next four years: years of new friendships and opportunities. But that hope, and happiness, would not last long. ​

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March 12th, 2020 marked the beginning of the end. As I sat in my ninth-period Biology class completing that day’s double-sided worksheet, the startling feedback of the loudspeaker interrupted. Due to the rapid spread of Covid-19, we would have to switch to online learning for the rest of the year. My chest contracted, the breathless pain of anxiety squeezing every last ounce of ambition from my esophagus. My high school experience, like so many other students’, was gone. 

Isolation quickly replaced time once spent socializing with classmates and friends. My bedroom, a place of comfort and peace morphed to an insomniac’s dull prison cell. The gray of the sheets clouded my mind, the Revere-Pewter walls becoming the sole focus of my attention. Hours passed with the emotionless binging of a Netflix series, only moving from the mattress to the taupe desk four feet away. The pandemic not only stripped away any sense of normalcy, but also the excitement and color from day-to-day life. The electricity that fueled scholastic motivation shut off suddenly, like a pair of freshly sharpened scissors taken to a thin red cord. As time went on stuck in that repetitive state of saddened numbness, my mental health declined. 

I am a part of a generation with some of the lowest attention spans yet. Technology has a place in nearly every second of life, and has since my birth. I don’t remember much of my grandfather, but I do remember my 5-year-old self sitting in a church pew at his funeral, tugging on my distraught mother’s dress and begging to play games on her phone while my brothers cried for the last time in a decade. My generation has grown up with technology, but with every step taken toward adolescence, technology took leaps and bounds towards adulthood, carrying new generational expectations to keep up with it. But society still expected us to cope healthily with the deaths of millions of people, even though handling a single family member’s death feels unfathomable. The sudden transition to online learning brought these dependencies and pressures to light, as any potential for a screen break ended with that final school bell. Revealing headlines sharing the videos and stories of ongoing civil injustices within the United States forced us to recognize and face the tragedies of our global state. Although I grew up watching the news, witnessing the horrors of the Sandy Hook and Parkland shootings, 2020 brought pain to a new light. There seemed no point in having hope for humanity anymore. 

The Covid-19 pandemic accentuated the ubiquity of technology, providing no escape from the 24-hour news cycle. Even school could not distract from the guilt, sadness, and hopelessness that arose from the omnipresence of injustice and mourning. Empathy is a beautifully poignant emotion, and one of the most important within the human condition; it drives action, prevention, and resilience, shaping each individual’s personality. But the constant amounts of empathy required all at once this past year often felt too overwhelming. For months on end, everything turned gray.

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