by Angela Moore | Jul 12, 2022 | Leonia High School
I felt behind.
I was a very timid person even before all of this. I was not able to handle social situations that well so I would overthink everything. I wasn’t funny, I wasn’t cool, and I wasn’t popular. People knew me and I knew them but I wasn’t that important. I was worried I was going to make a bad joke. I was worried people were going to look at me weird. I thought to myself when looking at others, “how is he so funny?” and “how is he so cool?”
I knew that I was missing something but I didn’t know what it was. I was trying my hardest, but no matter what I always felt behind.
Then COVID hit. I realized that everyone is in the same place. I wasn’t behind anyone. In fact I felt as though I was ahead. I treated the time in quarantine as a time to better myself, to “catch up” to all those who I thought were ahead of me. I wanted to return as a new and improved person, someone that no one had seen before. I wanted to enjoy life the same way my popular peers did. I worked and worked until I got what I wanted.
The best part was when the 2021-2022 school year started, I was a completely different person. I was able to handle myself. I was able to make people laugh. I was able to form my own friend groups and not be the guy on the side. It’s because of COVID that I got this opportunity to better myself – in the end, the world had to stop for me to get ahead.
by Angela Moore | Jul 12, 2022 | Leonia High School
It was a couple of months into the pandemic, in the middle of the night, when a small part of my brain asked a very troubling question: “What if I’m not a girl?” From knowing several trans and non-binary friends over the years, I was fairly confident that I was a cisgender girl, and a really strong ally. The more I questioned it, the more I felt the overwhelming need to solve the puzzle. No matter what thoughts I explored, something in me didn’t feel as confident and real. Several of my friends had already experienced this and figured themselves out fairly quickly. I longed to have the same confidence in my gender identity. The question nagged at me. I was fairly new and impressionable in the field of gender identity so I didn’t want to ask my friends for fear of being swayed to a decision I wasn’t entirely comfortable with, as well as the fear of telling them I was something that I might later discover was false. On the other hand, the only other people to talk to were my family, but this wasn’t exactly something they were experts on.
I was fully ready to bury the subject deep down. I was confused and frustrated that the answer hadn’t hit me yet. However, everything leveled out after I finally logged onto social media. Before quarantine, I had hated social media, thinking that it was toxic and dangerous for teenagers. But after being isolated for so long with nothing but my idiot brothers to entertain me, I had a new perspective. And, contradictory to every bit of common sense I had, it was surprisingly good for my situation. There was an increase of positive LGBT representation in the media, and I saw several people sharing similar experiences to mine. It relieved me knowing I was not alone, and it was nice to feel seen in a world where I couldn’t step outside my house.
It ended up taking me over a year to come to terms with my gender identity, finally coming out as transgender in September of 2021. It took a while, but that time was all we had during COVID – eventually I learned that I didn’t need to rush into making a decision when I have my whole life ahead to discover more about myself.
While the pandemic may have caused me to be isolated and alone during one of the most stressful periods of my life, it also caused me to think and explore possibilities I would have never seen if I hadn’t been given the time to think.
by Angela Moore | Jul 12, 2022 | Leonia High School
My grandma flew regularly to Indonesia to visit and care for her mother, my beautiful and strong great-grandmother, Atai. Though Athai was ninety-six years old and raised six children as a single mother, she’d never experienced something quite like the Coronavirus pandemic.
My mother and grandma were planning her once-every-couple-years trip to Indonesia. We couldn’t all go, of course. Money was scarce, and my sister and I had only met Athai once, back in 2015. Even then, her health had been declining. News of Athailanding in the hospital had become so regular I’d began thinking nothing of it. I always figured she’d fight and come back to us, as she always did. Grandma was ready to fly home to Indonesia right away; but flight restrictions made that impossible. We were left with feelings of hopelessness and despair. Athai was dying, and none of us were with her.
My mother hoped some of our relatives would stay by Atai’s bedside and keep her company. It proved a challenge to find even one person willing to risk their safety to make the trip to Athai’s near-empty flat. My grandma would give anything to be with her mother in her last moments, yet nobody was willing to wipe a dampened towel across Athai’s cheek, hold her thin hand, or repay her for all the years of her dedication put into her children.
I chose to bury myself in online classes where I stayed silent and unresponsive. I didn’t speak a word until six in the evening. I ignored my aunts and sister who worked alongside me at their own tables. We shared a room, some of us shared a bed. I loathed that situation. I trudged along the sidewalk in the hot outdoors suffocating under my mask, footsteps loud in the quiet street. I walked fast and hard, longing to be seen or heard. Everyone is for themselves, and I absolutely hate it. It is a cycle I repeat for months.
My grandma is on the phone, alongside my mother and aunts. I hear grandma say hello. Her quiet, calm, soothing voice comforts her mother. She tells Athaiif God is calling her to come home, then she should, and that they will see each other again someday. Mother later tells me the phone call was encouraged by the pastor who came to see Atai. He’d asked grandma to give Athaia call and comfort her so that she might rest. This works, because grandma tells me Athai has died the next morning.
It saddens me to know grandma had to say goodbye to her mother over the phone, and even more so when I realized she had to encourage Athai to rest.
I am proud when grandma speaks fondly of when she can go home to Indonesia and visit her mother’s grave, forced to give a bad goodbye in the belief that there will yet be one more hello.
by Angela Moore | Jul 12, 2022 | Leonia High School
Walks at night helped me clear my mind, and I found myself taking them frequently. Taking a breath of fresh air after being stuffed in my room all day helped me relax. One night, I walked in the rain. No doubt from the drizzle, the park was desolate.
The swings had a layer of slightly muddy water on them, but I sat down anyway. The water soaked through my sweatpants, the feeling of being outside seeped into my clothes, and I felt the weight of the world coming back to me. The rain water soaked through my mask and stuck to my face, but the feeling wasn’t uncomfortable or confining, it felt normal.
In the rain, the old COVID life was slowly washing away.
by Angela Moore | Jul 12, 2022 | Leonia High School
People crowded the streets from sunrise until sunset every day; every block was alive with civilians who were walking their dogs or on their way to work. New York City, frequently referred to as the city that never sleeps, was just that. Every street, of every neighborhood, all five boroughs, was always crowded with people. The streets were never empty, and with the weather getting warmer, people were out more than ever. Every morning, the Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts were filled with people trying to get a quick coffee and sandwich before heading to work or school. The parks contained dog owners who were conversing as their pets sniffed each other, and the playgrounds were packed with children playing after a day at school. New York City had never been more alive than it did in early spring 2020.
I had been living in the Bronx with my mother and in Queens with my father. I went to school in the Upper West Side as this was a good middle point between my two apartments. Middle school wasn’t the best period of my life, so I was glad that it was coming to an end, and I could transfer out of the school I was attending.
When New York began to see rising COVID cases, particularly in Queens, my friend Sonia and I thought that the best way of being safe would be to wear latex gloves. Our last day of school was on March 10th, which fell on a Tuesday. That day I had worn a pink dress and had paired it with a jean jacket, and remembered having come home in the best mood because I had spent all of my afternoon out with my friends at the Frederick Douglass Playground a block away from my school. That night, however, my Dean sent an email to the parents. The email stated that they would close the school for two days because a student in our school had come in contact with somebody who knew someone else that had COVID. At this time, any sort of contact with somebody who might have had the virus was a huge deal. They wanted to deep clean the entire building to ensure a safe return to school. Of course, the news that school was closed for two days was the best thing that could have happened.
The two days were extended into the rest of the week, and then it was announced that we would remain closed for another week. After that week passed, they extended the closure until after our Spring Break. Two days eventually turned into the rest of the school year. The school I was attending was private and it wasn’t the most affordable. With the worry that I may not be able to continue at that school, my mother realized that it might have been time to move to an area that was more affordable.
New York City has always been an expensive city, but with the pandemic, finding a nice neighborhood to move to wasn’t easy. There were many factors that came into finding a place to move to aside from making sure that there was a nearby school that would provide a good education, such as ensuring that I was still near my father and that my mother could get to work on the East Side. Finding a new house became so difficult that it took us over a year to settle on a place.
The process of finding a new house wasn’t all that unique for me. I had moved around 8 times, switched schools 4 times, and lived in 3 different countries. I was familiar with what it was like to move, to pack everything up, and leave everyone behind. We spent months looking for a new place to move to until we finally settled on Edgewater, New Jersey. It was right across the Hudson River, only a 30 minute bus from the city, and was a decent distance from my father’s apartment in Queens. I recall my mother telling me when I got home from school one day that she had found an apartment “in a very nice, quiet area.” At first I didn’t think much of it, I just told her that I was excited to move and start a new life. But then it hit me – New Jersey?
Living in New York, I had gotten used to hearing motorcycles racing on the main road outside my house, the ice cream truck around the corner in the spring and summer, the constant honking because of the city’s traffic, and so much more. There wasn’t a time in which it was truly silent around my Bronx apartment. So when my mom told me about the silence, and how little people there were, I realized that this move would be completely different from what I was used to.
Living in New Jersey became a total change for me. I realized that there are barely any buses, and that they only run around every 30 minutes. I found that there wasn’t a deli or corner shop nearby where I could go get a BLT or an Arizona late at night if I was feeling hungry. My school was so much bigger than what I was used to. Everything felt so extremely different. I had moved before, but this time it left a heavy feeling in my heart. From my living room window, I could see the Manhattan skyline, and found myself sitting at the window wishing that I was one of the little people walking through the streets of Soho.
Because I had moved so much throughout my life, and lived in so many different houses and apartments, I never had an idea of where my “home” was. I didn’t really feel attached to any place, nor did I feel homesick for any of the places I had lived in. It wasn’t until I moved to Edgewater that I realized that my home isn’t a building, but rather a city.
New Jersey is where my house is thanks to COVID. But New York City will always be my home.
