Even though Covid 19 officially ended a few years ago, many teens are facing emotional and mental repercussions to this day. When the world shut down, the Gen Z developmental clock froze in time but we kept growing up. We went from everyday life looking like school, sports, clubs, to daily interactions with people our own age stopping completely. Our entire worlds shrunk to the size of a computer screen overnight.

Online schooling gave us a strong reliance on technology. When classes got too boring we could simply turn off our cameras and microphones and go back to sleep. That is because most of us did school from our bedrooms. We built comfort zones in our bedrooms. Going from being in your pajamas learning from home to 7+ hour school days isn’t for the weak. When schools reopened we were expected to jump right back to school as if we hadn’t just spent our prime developments being completely isolated. It broke everyone’s routine and made it 110% harder to find motivation to do what we used to love.  

This sudden shift did not only ruin our academics, it changed how we treated each other. Today, many teens struggle between mental health awareness and complete isolation. We’ve leaned so far into “protecting our peace” that sometimes it’s just an excuse to be a bad friend. But how can you blame us? We taught ourselves that dropping commitments and “ghosting” people is self care when in reality we were just struggling to rebuild our normal connections.

The world expects us to be completely fine because technically the pandemic ended years ago. But you can’t just erase years of isolation. Moving forward means you have to admit that we might have a little part of all of us that is still stuck in our bedrooms and we have realized that true self care might be stepping outside and answering our text and showing up for each other again.