While cozy winter breaks come to an end, for many high school seniors, the beginning of the year signifies back-to-back college deadlines, decisions, and days spent on application essays. However, this season has also taken on an entirely new meaning for the class of 2024, as the four-year anniversary of COVID-19 and global lockdowns draws near.
Young people who entered the pandemic as high school freshmen now move into their final semester. Many high schoolers over the last few years have mourned the typical high school experience, parts of which they missed out on thanks to COVID-19. But today’s seniors never really had that typical experience at all. So as they near the end of high school, they envision what’s to come – whether it be the milestone of graduation or the possibilities of higher education – all the while reminiscing on what could have been, had the pandemic never happened. As they mull over the what-ifs of canceled ceremonies and the missed rites long-associated with teenagehood, some feel robbed.
“Where did my years go? I was in eighth grade and now I’m in 12th grade. How did all of this happen?,” high school senior Divya Bamorya, 17, from India, often asks herself. “It was very difficult to even realize what time [meant] to me.”
For such students, having to readjust their understandings of time and closure amid great unrest has been no easy task. Rather, redefining what it means to come of age has been an ongoing process. The era of virtual classes may (mostly) be over, but the effects of the pandemic continue reverberating through the halls of these final months of high school. Below, we spoke with the class of 2024 to learn how COVID-19 has informed their past four years: from navigating uncharted waters and coping with loss, to creating community in spaces that needed it the most.
Confronting Change and Uncertainty
“The pandemic hit three months after my dad died,” 18-year-old Stella Sturgill, from the United States, tells Teen Vogue. At the time of her father’s passing, she lived with her mother and sister. Even as her household’s structure remained the same, she very much felt his absence, and it was compounded by the lockdowns. “We were all, in different ways, experiencing this really acute, intense grief,” Sturgill said.
Several time zones away, in England, senior Gamu Mavhinga, 17, dealt with the death of her dad at the hands of COVID-19. Time seemed to erode, with moments of stagnancy followed by rapid transformation, especially felt once she moved to the United Kingdom from Africa and had to resume high school virtually. “It felt a lot like a blur [and] was such an intense period of anxiety, forming friendships, and trying to maintain those as well with [my] family…It’s almost like I didn’t have time to stop and think,” she said.
While Mavhinga grappled with change after change in her new home, she also observed “a weird sort of disparity,” wherein several of her friends were consumed with fear for the wellbeing of their families abroad – mirroring her concerns for her relatives in Zimbabwe and South Africa – while other acquaintances downplayed the severity of the pandemic, spending hours lounging in bed and making TikToks about how bored they were. “There was just such a gap between those two different experiences,” she said. “I used to feel very angry at people who couldn’t really understand how everyone else felt.”
She remembers worrying that anger would always cloud her hope. Similarly, Bamorya recalls how much time she’d spent looking forward to ninth grade, only for it to never happen in the traditional sense; anxieties over her community’s safety squashed any excitement she once had. For teenagers across the globe, “being separated from friends, separated from families, even losing people from the illness [or] grieving over the lives we could’ve had,” as Sturgill said, revealed just how nuanced the gradient of loss has been. Big or small, these feelings of separation were difficult to define and pin down, as were young people’s means of coping with and reacting to them.
Resilience in the Face of Ambiguous Loss
First defined by educator and researcher Pauline Boss in the ‘70s, ambiguous loss can encapsulate losses that lack resolve or fall outside of our conventional understandings of these experiences. The feeling is familiar but the source is not – it’s a sort of pain that refuses all categorization, a pain without definite closure. It was a sort of pain that, once put into words, encouraged Sturgill to “find ways to make meaning out of these kinds of losses.”
“When I think really broadly about resilience and adaptability, what resonates is this idea of being able to support yourself [while] supporting those around you,” she said. By creating support systems, actively checking in on classmates and family over text or call, acts of kindness spoke volumes. Bamorya thinks about how her parents used to bring lunch to her neighbor every day after he caught COVID and became too ill to cook for himself. “The pandemic has taught me that a good friendship will stay, wherever you are,” she said.
For Mavhinga, the comfort that family offered during and after her father’s funeral opened her eyes to the vast network of support surrounding her. At the funeral, the high school senior recounts a conversation she had with her uncle, who said that “‘what binds us is something more, because we are a family. You always have me and I'll always have you and your pain is my pain.’”
Community, Redefined
Whether it be completing Chloe Ting workout challenges with friends, organizing online study groups, or finding digital forums for one’s favorite fandoms, “it was the silly things to help us feel like we were actually together when we couldn’t be,” Mavhinga said. Taking the initiative to create their own schedules and stay busy offered relief so many had yearned for; friendship no longer needed to be tethered to – or proven by – physical interaction. Some teens sought refuge in crafting, while many opted to bake bread. Still, for others, podcasting turned out to be the ultimate outlet.
“Sunlight that you shine on your face in the winter,” is how Sturgill described first discovering, then joining, the podcast This Teenage Life, a podcast by and for teens. While in eighth grade, she started listening to podcasts to accompany her on daily walks and recalls eagerly consuming one episode after another of TTL. This fulfilled the sense of connection she felt she lacked throughout lockdown, and during her freshman year of high school, she reached out to the podcast, eventually becoming a part of its dialogue group with other teens.
For Mavhinga, “hearing people [her] age in real time talk about how they were feeling in a way that wasn’t condescending” was a refreshing reminder of shared struggles. The wide scope of topics that TTL explored, ranging from mental health to favorite snacks and movies, appealed to her and Bamorya.
Amid the turmoil of the 2020 presidential election, senior and TTL member Jayden Dial, 17, from the United States, “needed a way to feel like [she] was making some type of impact” and reached out to fellow students she knew who were a part of This Teenage Life. Dozens of discussions later, her hopes were brought to fruition, as she began sharing the podcast’s episodes with her school teachers to help them confront conversations over racism in the classroom.
On and offline, continually redefining togetherness, resilience, and adaptation has become, as Mavhinga calls it, the “collective binding force” that unites her graduating class. Dial echoes this sentiment and has found that, after becoming so used to constant adaptations, she’s now eager to take on the unknowns that college has to offer. “It’s been a pretty wacky four, five years, and I’m just ready to see what else life has to give me,” she said.
“Going into college, I know our relationships are going to change, just like they did during the pandemic,” Sturgill says, “but I have faith and understanding that I will be able to adapt.”
