At a young age, I would always be to myself. In order to make friends and defeat this loneliness, I pursued a false persona, where I was trying to be accepted and please everyone around me. This false persona seemed impressive to everyone, but for me, it was uncomfortable. I caused a war between my true self and my falsified character. I didn’t know what was best for me, and I was suffering because of it. Throughout my first year in college, this was ongoing, but eventually, I found a way to find my true self and be proud of who I am through surrounding myself with really supportive friends.

I haven’t revealed my true self up ‘till last year. Until then, I was buying name-brand clothing to show off my status and present myself differently to fit in. It wasn’t until I encountered a classmate, Ralph, where I finally made the decision to just be confident in myself no matter what people thought. He saw through my false persona and guided me towards the right path. He taught me to be confident in who I am and to just focus on my future goals. He would tell me, “Don’t let nobody make you feel as if you need to change to fit in. Just focus on your future and grind hard. Put yourself and your family first.” His words lit a spark in me, and I looked up to him as a big brother. He is a strong-willed person that is confident in himself and strives to succeed. Surrounding yourself with people who strive to be great is beneficial and inspiring. It is what I needed to get confident in my true self and become who I was meant to be, a motivating man aiming to live life fully and gain success, despite what people think.

Furthermore,  Ralph became a great friend of mine; he brought me around a group of friends that helped me to more. The group consists of strong-willed people just like Ralph, aiming to support each other’s endeavors. Whenever anyone has a problem with their schoolwork or a situation at home, we support them and advise them like brothers. It is like a second home. Being a part of this group helped me stay on the right path to growing into a confident, strong-willed man and developing a mature mindset. 

In addition, with everyone’s input, we were able to create a music studio, called Benzo Music Studio, using our saved money. The Benzo Music studio supports upcoming singers and rappers by providing producing services at a low cost. I may not be a rapper myself, but I found a way to support them as a music engineer. Through this experience, I was able to find my identity as creative and make lifelong relationships with some friends. 

When I have assignments normally I would print them and read afterward. I was trained to read the paper book as a child and all my adulthood. I would only read brief news on the screen and some emails. When I went back to school in 2019 it was clear to me that I have to strain my eyes to read on the screen otherwise I would be behind the program. Especially things become more severe when we went fully remotely. I had to do a test on the screen and it is still challenging. I believe soon the paper books will be obsolete. I learned how to speed my reading on the small screen. 

I remember a year ago from today, I was in school enjoying my time with my friends and family, traveling to Central park, movie theaters, restaurants, and just living my life. Flushing was one of my favorite places to go out to eat out with my friends; Flushing was kind of like Chinatown but better. It was filled with different types of Asian cuisines and I had a goal of exploring Flushing and tasting all the dishes I can. That soon ended when I received a message from my friends saying NYC is on lockdown, public schools will be closed, and people needed social distance, I had to confirm it on the news to make sure this was not a prank. When I was confirmed I was shocked by what I was listening to. From there on, life changed fast, actually, too fast.

My Mother Is A Hero

    New York City is my home. I love New York City. It’s a place of opportunities, different ethnicity, and cultural festivals. People don’t care what you wear, or what your skin color is.  During the pandemic, everything changed, so did New York City. When lockdown started, New York City became a city that left the streets quiet with no people and traffic. Everyone stayed home, students did online classes, and some people had to work from home. Others had to work on the front line to save lives. Social workers had to continue working and risking their own lives to keep grocery stores, pharmacies, and convenience stores. The pandemic caused a lot of worry, sadness, stress, anxiety. I was worried about my 33-year-old mother, who worked in 7/11 at Manhattan 75th street as a cashier for ten years. Across from where my mother works is a hospital, my mother witnessed ambulances arriving and taking bodies out and rushing inside, seeing that my mother feels worried and scared. Every day my mother comes home and tells me how many people entered the hospital and how many ambulances arrived. It increased every day and that terrified us. “What happens If i lose my mother because of covid?”  “What happens If I don’t see her tomorrow?”. All these negative and painful thoughts were running in my head, I started to fear losing my mother so I made sure every day I spent my time with my mother as much as I could. I love my mother; she is my inspiration and my biggest support through my education. Knowing my mom being brave and risking her own health to work and provide for nurses, doctors, and other essential workers made me feel worried but also inspired me to work harder in college. My mom is an essential worker and she is helping so many people and I consider her a hero too.

High School Graduation

I never thought I would ever graduate from high school during a pandemic. It sounds cool, but in reality, it was depressing and exciting at the same time. My last half-year of senior year was spent at my home, on my desk and working on assignments, and making sure I submitted all the assignments that were assigned. I am an introverted person but an extrovert when I hang out with the right people. What I missed the most was hanging out with my friends but the pandemic didn’t stop us from hanging out. My friends and I would have group calls and we would do our assignments together and talk about how close we were to graduate and how we will miss each other.

The years 2020-2021 have been riddled with disturbing and unprecedented incidents, such as the death of George Floyd, which sparked the Black Lives Matter campaign, the raid on the capitol in Washington D.C.,an increase in bigotry and brutality against the Asian population and many more . The years 2020 and 2021 have been very frustrating and perplexing for many people throughout the world filled with challenging obstacles that we had to face and overcome. The World Health organization declared Codiv-19 a worldwide pandemic in March 2020, forcing the whole world to close down and quarantine in their homes as the pandemic was being monitored. As the cases of Covid-19 grew exponentially, we were all worried, panicked, or in mourning for their loved ones who passed away from covid or were hospitalized.Because of the pandemic, many countries around the world have imposed stringent laws that must be followed in order to protect themselves from the virus. During quarantine all students had to stay home and learn from online using apps like google classroom or Zoom which in the beginning made many students happy because they had to stay home and not really pay attention i myself was one of them but when the cases rose exponentially all i saw on the news was the number of deaths increasing every single day which made me very concerned for the safety for me and my family and it also made me emotionally unstable overthinking about everything always getting paranoid when my mom or my sister had any problems such as headache or stomach ache, watching the number of deaths increase more and more as time passed didn’t help either but my parents always reassured me and as time flew i graduated high school and started college which was weird because it was still all online and i would have never guessed that my first year in college would be me studying in my own house. At this point I stopped overthinking everything and started to relax since the cases were decreasing and everything was slowly getting back to normal. However, as the number of cases of covid decreased and everything started to return to normal, hate crimes against Asian Americans rose to the point that they threatened the lives of Asian Americans. This caused thousands of  people to rally all around the country to raise concern of the racial injustice that Asian Americans have faced. from 2020 to 2021 Asian hate crime has increased by 145% and the overall hate crime dropped by 6%( Anti-Asian Prejudice March 2021 Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism). Many people have experienced stress, rage, sorrow, and other negative emotions as a result of the pandemic but some instead of coping with it properly they needed someone to let their anger out causing the increase in all the violence and harassment towards Asian Americans even now as the pandemic is slowly coming down people are still attacking Asian American. On April 26 2021 a 61 year old man Yao Pan Ma was violently attacked, he was pushed down and got kicked repeatedly in the head when all he did was collect bottles in his grocery cart to earn some money and now because of this Yao Pan Ma is in a coma. This is very disturbing to me and it makes me sad that some people think attacking an elderly person till he is in critical condition is ok

[…] The pandemic closed down many things, but we had to continue with our lives. At the time quarantine began, I was in highschool, and had art class on my schedule. I drew the above picture to describe how I felt. I felt trapped inside my own apartment, yearning to go outside in the rain. I enjoy walking in the rain, so I drew the girl with her umbrella ready to go, but all she can do is stare out her window. Some people consider opening an umbrella inside as bad luck, but I wasn’t thinking of that. Instead, although everything else was drawn and traced in black contrasting with white, I drew a yellow umbrella. In this case, yellow symbolizes hope. Since yellow is also a color for happiness, I was hoping my happiness would remain with me, although my surroundings seemed to rain on what was supposed to be a great year.

One way I kept my joy was by giving. I tried to help others and worry less about the problems around me. This gave me strength.

Pictures of envelopes in which I wrote letters to neighbors, to help cope through the difficult times.

[..] On this multimodal documentation of my pandemic life, I decided to focus on the positive outcomes of the pandemic. It would be hard to include everything, and my pictures went from pictures to screenshots, but the focus is the same. This pandemic has taught me resilience and the importance of attitude. There are so many problems in the world, and when I watch the news, the virus is probably the least threatening thing right now. It appalls me to see how horribly people have acted towards each other in history, and how humans continue to demonstrate hateful traits. However, if I want to see a change, I know it must begin with myself. 2020 was a confusing year, but it allowed me to grow in endurance and patience. I’ve had opportunities that I might’ve never received otherwise. In the beginning, I did feel trapped and anxious for the future. Sometimes that feeling creeps inside of me again. Still, there’s been a before and after in me. I feel more ready than ever to tackle what the future should throw at me. If I was happy before, I’m happier now, because I’ve endured.

March 13, 2020, was the last day of what felt normal in my life. It was the last day I would wake up at 6 am to catch the B82 and stand back to back with people. I have never seen a crowded bus since that day and that should say a lot considering how many take NYC transportation. I remember my 8 am class that day; kids were popping jokes about the world ending. This one guy came in with a mask and gloves on, we all thought it was super weird, but who knew that would be our new normal.  I was praying so hard that we would have a two-week break but little did I know it would extend well beyond a year. It was a year of personal growth that I don’t think would have changed me that much had the pandemic not happened. It was not Covid that I feared it was more so not knowing what the future had in store.  It was frightening how quiet the streets were and even if you did see someone it was 6ft away with an N95. 

 

I graduated from my living room on June 30th, 2020, as my graduation was live-streamed on YouTube. I can’t wait to tell future generations what it was like because it really is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, well hopefully. It was kind of depressing because I expected to have family around but it was just me and my mom watching from my couch. I’m really a go big or go home type of person so if you told me this was the way things would be back in 2019 I would’ve cried. That wasn’t the case here though, I was genuinely grateful that we were sitting there happy and healthy. The pandemic made me appreciate the people around me so much more. I was so naive to think that nothing would ever happen to the ones I love but the constant fear of one of them catching covid took a toll on me. 

 

 If you could ask the person I was in March if she believed that she would grow as a person as a result of the quarantine, she would have laughed in your face and locked herself in her room. But as I spent more time with myself away from the outside world, I started to do the thing that had always scared me the most: self-reflect. Self-reflection was something I did at night when I couldn’t sleep because I’d said something dumb six months ago. More specifically, I got to know myself and the people around me.

 

 

The year 2020 has been a difficult and confusing year since I was an understudy and was very much under pressure from multiple events taking place and deprived of a prom and graduation.  

 

  The Year that life became real…

 

In March 2020, the World Health Organization announced COVID-19 a worldwide pandemic in which I lost an aunt and two teachers I was really close to. Both teachers were great  and helped me grow from the ninth grade to the 11th. In light of Covid-19, numerous nations have applied severe social removing measures and a lockdown strategy. The pandemic genuinely affected schools, students, and educators. Students and educators were not permitted in school building, and most organizations have changed to a web-based instruction and learning approach, which was a roller coaster ride. Subsequent to being confronted with the truth of COVID-19, following measures presented by governments everywhere in the world, and different plans made by schools in consistence with these actions, students and teachers needed to roll out an intense improvement to the new customary educating and learning approach, working and gaining from home. The universe of educating and learning has changed significantly and we ended up depending on innovation to direct talks and other instructing learning exercises. Our universe changed drastically where we were basically forced to utilize innovation and learn programs quickly. Notwithstanding these changes, life goes on, and we need to live with this new reality which is personally alluded to as ‘another ordinary’. At numerous establishments, online contributions incorporated the transferring of learning materials onto learning the executive frameworks, acquisition of PCs for students who did not approach PCs, and the getting of free information to the class materials to guarantee that internet learning didn’t get restrictive to students and teachers as far as expenses. Students and teachers needed to change to this new method of conveyance. It felt as if we were rushing to learn how to speak a foreign language; from Google Meet, Zoom and Edgenuity which were all challenging at the beginning. Getting to know these programs overnight was a nightmare for all stakeholders. 

Advanced communications, including exercises, appraisal errands, commitment with students and virtual council gatherings have become ‘another typical’. As a result of COVID-19, computerized education and qualities that were already hard to address, are being cultivated to assist them with exploring the 21st century. The present circumstance makes learning on the web and mixed learning significantly more important than previously. The instructive issues and arrangements have been alluded to as Panic-gogy—for panic + pedagogy. Frenzy gogy implies understanding students’ pragmatic assets and issues, including the accessibility of gadgets and the web, family obligations, students sent home who need to track down another spot to live, and monetary imperatives. In any case, it likewise implies tending to the subject of how educators will move into this climate with their instructing approaches. The tensions between parents, (my mom was out of control), school administrators, and the chancellor grew strong. I mean what could we expect if those leading us couldn’t get it right.  My experience surfing the new norm was by far the worst experience ever, but the worst was my parents trying to help make the current situation better for my sister and I who were seniors, and a piece of our joy and laughter was stolen from us.

During this extraordinary time, I don’t figure we ought to permit the uncommon open door we presently must have the option to watch progressively what the impacts of social removal can mean for our emotional well-being. Prior to the pandemic, a large number of us were at that point participating in a type of social separating. Maybe not precisely the same way we are currently rehearsing, however, the innovation that we have created over ongoing years has prompted an emotional decrease in our social contact and abilities when all is said in done.

 

The discussion about whether we ought to stay isolated during this time isn’t a contention I am attempting to seek after. All things considered, I am attempting to urge us to see this occasion as an interesting chance to concentrate on what social separation can mean for individuals’ psychological wellness throughout an extensive stretch of time and with sensational outcomes because of the greatness of the recent concern. Despite the fact that Covid-19 is new and new to everybody, the disconnection and detachment we currently face are definitely not. For some, this kind of conduct has effectively been a direction for living for quite a while. In any case, the current circumstance we as a whole presently face has permitted us to acquire individual understanding into how that experience feels because of the current conditions. Mental illness continues to be a pervasive issue all through the world and consequently could be