The Fountain: Fleeting Time and the Summer of ‘21

BY SATVIKI SINGH

PHOTO CREDITS :

DAVID AIKENS @ SOPHMORZ_PHOTOGRAPHY JIHOVANY BRETON@JBSHOTTHAT Headed into my senior year - my last year of high school - I want to savor every experience I have this next year before graduation. I find it odd how almost a year and a half has gone by since I last lived what I once considered a ‘normal’ life. Aside from changes in taste of fashion and music, the one thing that has truly changed is my outlook on the passage of time. The flow of time that I once knew and lived by has been severely altered. It is simply different and devolvable. Much of my lockdown was spent during my Junior year of high school. The year was planned to be full of changes even before the pandemic, as I was changing campuses of my school,

joining a new research lab, and serving new positions in clubs. The changes I experienced with the pandemic on top were far greater. During this year, I signed up for too many extracurriculars, courses, and long commutes and felt like I was drowning. Each week, I would already think about the week following it, marking down each day and each week in a desperate attempt to make summer come closer and closer.

Once the Spring semester ended and summer started in May, I was finally able to breathe and take a look at myself. Of course, I wanted to savor this summer as I knew it would be my last official high school summer, but it felt like time was fleeting. Each day I would wake up and blink only to find that the entire day was over and it was time for me to sleep again. First, I found that this was largely due to my usage of social media and my phone; to fight this, I deleted Tiktok and Instagram, forcing myself to work on my summer classes and read more. Despite this, I felt the same, only slightly more productive, so I tried a series of other activities in hopes that it would stretch out my day. I would feel anxious all the time. I started journaling more, and it slowly became a daily routine until I was writing between 5-15 pages every day. This practice stuck with me. I finally had a place to share my thoughts. I realized that a lot of my problems were coming from a place of anxiousness and dependency on instant validation, which made me think about how and what I was prioritizing in my life. I noticed that I made almost no time for things that brought me joy - like meeting with friends, running, and watching a long movie without worrying about work; instead, I had prioritized attending clubs that I did not enjoy and working on projects that I did not care for. Learning this, I made a vow to cut out things that do not make me happy. Of course, I could not cut out classes or certain people I had to see, but I did cut out many things by the end of summer and pick up more health-conscious habits, like exercising more and sleeping early.

As summer ends and the Fall semester starts again, time still feels to be ticking by too fast, but I am better equipped to deal with the fleetingness and the anxious feeling it gives me. At the beginning of this article, I mentioned that my perception of time had changed completely during the lockdown. While I want to blame the pandemic, I truly cannot. My perception of time was since I had become so anxious with millions of thoughts firing through my brain. In my Junior year, I gave myself no time to sit down and breathe to the point that I had not even noticed obvious physical changes in myself. Unlike before, when time flowed slowly and carefully all the time, I am now living in a world where I have to actively slow it down and take my time curating my thoughts and daily activities by my own will. As school opens, I hope to continue practicing the self-care habits I picked up over the summer, like sleeping early, journaling, reading books, and exercising to ensure that I can enjoy my last year of high school to the fullest extent.

The Fountain is a space for youth to share their point of view on things that matter to them. To contribute, send your article ideas to thewell@bewellpbc.org with “The Fountain” in the subject line.