08.03.26 - i still feel 17

covid hit when i was 17, and this year i’m turning 23. i’m graduating. by all appearances, time has passed the way it should. i got older. i reached important milestones i never thought i could. i kept going.

but truth is, part of me still feels 17.

that’s one of the hardest things to explain about the impact covid had on me. from the outside, life moved forward. it kinda always does. but people expect you to adjust, to recover, to keep up. and in many ways, i did. but internally, it feels like something paused back then and never fully started again. 

at 17, life is supposed to be opening up. you’re supposed to be growing into yourself, building memories, discovering who you are, stepping into the world with excitement and uncertainty. instead, the world shut down. everything became smaller, quieter and just isolated. and i think that period shaped me more than i realized at the time.

now i’m about to graduate college, and i’m turning 23 this year. those are things that are supposed to make me feel older, wiser and more certain of myself. but sometimes i feel like i’m standing at the edge of adulthood while part of me is still mentally stuck in that moment when everything just stopped.

it’s a strange kind of grief, mourning years you technically lived through but never fully got to experience the way you were meant to. and i don’t think people talk enough about that. not all loss is obvious. sometimes loss looks like delayed growth, disconnection or feeling behind in ways you can’t fully explain.

there must be others who are also reaching milestones while quietly feeling like a part of them is still stuck in the age they were when the pandemic began (i hope)

maybe that is one of covid’s long lasting effects.. not just what it interrupted and took from us in the moment, but what it changed in us afterward. our sense of time. our sense of self. our ability to feel fully caught up to our own lives.

this year, i turn 23. this year, i graduate college. and still, somewhere inside me, i am still 17, trying to understand how so much time passed while part of me stayed there.