I just started driving and it was the funniest thing because everyone in my family besides me knows how to drive. My sister’s working toward — my sibling is, working toward getting their license. I always forget they’re non-binary too but they’re like also not out so around parents and people, they’re my sister. By myself, they are my sibling. It’s kinda weird. But you do what you gotta do to keep your identity safe. What was it? Driving. Driving was fun. I got real scared though. Cause I didn’t know that when you take your foot off the brake, the car just moves. Like you don’t — I forgot that cars move without acceleration, right? So if you take your foot off the brake it just moves slowly, and the accelerator’s for what it is. It’s for making it go faster, but I forgot that it would go even if I didn’t have my foot on the accelerator. So my dad tells me to let my foot gently off the brake and I take it off the brake and the car starts moving and I get scared and I immediately slam my foot back down on the brake. It was so funny.

I didn’t want to have red hair. I didn’t want to have curly hair. I wanted to look like everyone else. So especially like seventh and eighth grade, I’d straighten my hair every day. I tried to like, pull it back in ponytails and just, I didn’t want it to be straight — I didn’t want to be curly. I wanted to be bone straight like everyone else. I used tanning stuff, sometimes to make my skin look tanner so I looked like other people. I tried to dress like other people, like I, no hate to anyone who wears this, obviously. But I’d wear Lululemon leggings every day and never wore jeans like ever and never really dressed up at all. And I think that was really bad for me. Like I’d wear baggy t-shirts, and I’d be really, I was really insecure about my body because for me like looking at other people, I felt like I was like overweight or fat. And now looking at myself I am neither of those things. I am healthy and like, everyone is healthy at their own weight, obviously. And I don’t know why I felt like I looked so disgusting, but COVID really like, me being alone by myself really made me realize like, “Why am I doing this to myself?” Like, I’m, I want to change how I dress, so I changed how I dress. I don’t think I’ve worn a pair of Lululemon leggings, like, I wear leggings, but they aren’t like straight leggings, like, sticking to your skin, they’re looser. But I don’t think I’ve worn those Lululemon leggings in a good year, maybe year-and-a-half. I think it’s a year though, and I’ve made it a point to not wear them. Like, I never really gravitate to them anymore and I don’t really want to wear them ever again.

I guess I'll talk about… Yes, a bug that stings next when I was around five or six years old, I think it was five. I was staying over at my grandma's house. And when I was playing on the little plastic slide we had. I accidentally hit a bee with my hand and because I was just playing around with my brother and it bit me and I was trying very hard not to cry because I wanted to be tough as a kid and my grandma and mom were comforting me and trying to make me feel better, as they cleaned the sting. And my mom, trying to reassure me said that bees basically died after they stung a person. So that bee was going to be dead after it stung me. I think she said this to make me feel better, but I just felt so, so guilty because I knew it had it had been my fault that the bee stung me cuz I was just waving my hands around very wildly. And after that, I was just hyper aware of bees. Anytime in first or second or even third grade classmates would shout because there was a bee in the room and everyone would freak out, I would just like yell at everyone to sit down and stay still so it wouldn't sting you cuz I was just so concerned about other bees dying because me and other dumb kids were getting in their way. And I think it's silly because now I do know, like a lot about the Save the Bees movement, and I still tell people to just, like, calm down around bees and that they won't hurt them. And I think it's silly how just getting stung by one bee in—when I was five years old, still affects my behavior today, I guess.

When COVID began to get more serious our middle school had a huge assembly, which we talked about hand washing, covering your mouth and nose when sneezing, and we even watched a Brainpop video. Right away, the class clowns started to poke and slap each other and the ones that were really desperate for attention began to roll around on the cafeteria floor. At that point COVID was a joke to us, something scary but too far away to hurt us. And when the teachers used the words "global pandemic" and "historical event", and then when the principal compared it to 9-11 in a somber tone that was when we all started to worry. Later that day, we were told to wash our hands in the bathroom before lunch and being a bunch of middle schoolers that wasn't typically a habit for us. The environment in the school bathroom was unlike anything I've ever experienced before. Every single person in that bathroom was on edge, and usually for a bunch of middle school girls, we're talking and laughing all the time, but at that point, people were afraid to touch each other. That was March 11th. The next day, school shut down—March 12th, 2020. The school closing was surreal, but since we've been warned at the assembly, I figured that after spring break, I was most likely to be back in school. To be honest, I was most upset about not being able to see the guy I liked, which seems so silly now. My dad and aunt were out of the country at the time and they were visiting family. So I was shocked to hear that there was a very real possibility that they might be stuck there. I think that's when I knew COVID was getting more serious and there would be restrictions in our lives that I never experienced before. When we went to the grocery store, many of the aisles were bare, even the ones you wouldn't expect, like the fruit and nut aisle or the cereal aisle. And there were news reports of people hoarding toilet paper and basic supplies, which was so crazy to me, because toilet paper didn't seem like such a big deal before 2020, but suddenly it was something everyone needed and everyone needed so much of it that there were restrictions on the max number of these items available.…