Bronte King-Levine

“…Even before the stay at home order was enacted, I was so scared. At school, I was kind of paranoid because there are so many people in a school building….You move classrooms, so you could have the same desk as someone [else]. That freaked me out, so I wiped down my desk. It was just a scary thing. At the beginning of the pandemic, I had two grandparents who were old, and now I have one grandparent who’s really old. My grandmother has someone who comes to her house to help her around the house, so that’s kind of scary, because there’s someone going in and out of [her] house….I’m just…constantly scared, and I don’t like leaving my house at all….I want to see other people, but you can’t because it’s not only dangerous for you, it’s dangerous for them. What if you’re contaminated with something? I know I don’t leave the house, but other people in my house have to leave the house for groceries….[My parents] take all their precautions, but there’s just the unknown.…There’s that factor of the unknown that’s so scary, because you might not be showing symptoms for two weeks….When I’m feeling really upset, I watch certain videos on Youtube, because there are certain videos [there] that…lift my mood….If I’m feeling really anxious about something going on, I’ll watch a TV show, because it takes me out of our current world. Sometimes I find myself watching TV, and someone….is in a big, crowded room, and I’m like ‘Corona!’ but there’s not corona in the show….Seeing people live their everyday lives–since I can’t live my everyday life–in a show [helps].”