‘Covid has taught me the meaning of freedom and its purpose‘
Do you remember when freedom was having a day off from school or going on a vacation? Freedom was so easy to understand. Making your own choices about what you do, that is freedom. That was freedom. Now, the world is changing. The world has already changed, and there is no going back. Our definition of freedom has been redefined forever. We have to enjoy those small moments where we can forget about our troubles for one minute, and just enjoy the world. Those are moments of freedom.
Confinement will never be freedom. Our parents might think we are free, but what they have to understand is that free time does not equal freedom. In this world, it’s hard being a teenager. We are beginning to break off from our parents, so we feel the freedom of sneaking out, or hanging out with our friends, or skipping school. In the beginning, we thought, less school equals more freedom! But that is not how it went.
Quarantine felt like a dream for the first few days because we had no school! But then every day started to feel like the one before it and we think of all the friends we could have hung out with, and now this dream is a nightmare. A nightmare where all of the freedom that we had is gone. This has gotten so bad that we wish to go back to school.
Everything is not as bleak as it seems though. We are learning, realizing that while we might not have that much freedom, we do have a lot of free time. Will we use that free time to grow and rise? Or to sink? I hope that we all realize that in quarantine we can grow, become better people, with new skills.
Overall, in quarantine, the freedom we have is the freedom to choose. We have the choice to get up early to work out, or not have that extra cookie, or to be nice and pay attention to our zoom class. These are the choices that we can control. Believe it or not, when we were not in quarantine, these were also the choices we could control. Being in quarantine does not mean we can give up on our dreams, it just means we have to chase them differently.