Missed zoom calls.

Messed up sleep schedule.

Mountains of work piled up.

Repeat.

Online school doesn’t even feel like school anymore. 

It’s a monotonous day. We get up, we sit in front of a screen for seven hours, we do our homework in front of the screen for three more, we go to bed. And it repeats, and repeats, and repeats. And it’s not even the fact that it’s boring (which it can be) but there’s no motivation anymore. For many, online school feels like more of an option than it does school. 

Let me explain for the sake of better clarity. You type in the name of the website to check your grades. And all you see are a bunch of numbers. To some, it just doesn’t feel like those numbers matter anymore. I mean, we’re at home anyways, time feels like it’s barely moving, it just doesn’t seem worth it.

Me, I definitely understand that I need to be on top of things; even though that doesn’t mean I necessarily always am. But, I can understand this. And I also understand that we need to clear such thoughts before it becomes a habit. 

It starts off simple; “Who’s going to notice if I just skip my zoom call for today?” or “I’ll just turn this in late and blame it on something else.” No harm, no foul right? Wrong. Sometimes we need to take a break for our own health. And I wholeheartedly support that (I need to do that for myself too). But no matter how much of an option online school feels like, it’s not. 

And for me, it’s not even that I have so much work that I can’t do anything else. I have a lot of work but I would be majorly exaggerating if I said I had so much work that I couldn’t do anything else. Yet somehow, I’m still up until four a.m. pounding out my history essay. Why is that?

I think it has more to do with me not wanting to do my work in order to avoid the negativity in life. Especially, in situations like this, we try to maintain as much of the good thing (happiness, positivity) as possible. And so, even just thinking about the work that one has to do or ignoring something to avoid its consequences merely means that we just like to imagine our life without any mishaps, and I think that’s been taken to the extreme (especially now) since for many it seems to feel like these past few months have just been mishap after mishap. 

I think we just have to make sure that we don’t get carried away with trying to avoid our tasks so much instead of trying to overcome them. And how do I plan on doing that? I have no clue. But, the lesson to be learned here is that you don’t stop trying to figure that out.