My COVID Experience in Michael Herr's Style

Creative Project - Option Two:  My COVID Experience In Michael Herr's Style

It was the last day of real life for a long time. At the time, we didn’t know it would be a long time, but our school’s headmaster called everyone in for an assembly. He delivered a heartfelt speech, acknowledging the pandemic and its uncertainties, concluding with the poignant words, “See you on the other side.” It was the speech that made the pandemic threat alive for me—at the time, I knew no one who contracted the COVID disease and only heard news stories about it. After our last assembly, I went home not knowing I would not have those in my everyday life for a long time… 

 

With school turning online and my spring activities being postponed, I was at home doing nothing. I would wake up and roll over to join my classes in bed, then go down to the basement to play Call of Duty, FIFA, or whatever everyone else was playing on my Xbox. It was a boring life then—most of my day was spent on calls with my friends, talking nonsense while playing the popular video game we were into. The times when I got bored of talking to the same people and playing the same video games, I tried to pick up some new hobbies, further finding myself as a 15-year-old with limited social interactions. I learned many different weird skills, like how to do an ollie on a skateboard, how to smoak ribs, and how to play bar chords on the guitar. Every day, I would find some weird new thing to do to preoccupy myself.

 

When the summer rolled around and the world began to open, there still was not much to do during this time. Bored at home and only working once a week at my farmers market job, I told my dad I was going to start a landscaping business. He thought I was crazy since I had zero landing experience—hell’ I hadn’t ever cut the lawn at home. Without his confidence in me, I posted a Nextdoor advertisement listening for my services, and to my surprise, several people reached out in need of landscaping services. I built a solid clientele with plenty of jobs, providing a steady income. I kept my clients satisfied, retaining many of them throughout the summer. Starting this business was a good learning experience—I learned how to sell myself and how to work hard by myself. I further found what I wanted and how I to achieve that.

 

During this Covid summer, besides finding myself through mulching, weeding, and planting, I found a new group of friends. I became friends with some kids in my neighborhood that I never knew existed until I went outside to play basketball. Going outside to play every day, the days were better playing pick up every evening. This daily occurrence turned into a friend group where we started playing golf and hanging out with one another; it was COVID that brought us together and the inability to see our school friends easily. Making friends during this unprecedented time was great—it brought me new relationships that otherwise would have been formed in normal times.

 

After the summer passed and before my junior year of high school started, I looked at what this COIVD gave me. It gave me money from my landscaping business, it introduced me to a set of new friends, which all helped me find myself as a 16-year-old high schooler. These times were… much simpler—they allowed me to do what I wanted. I was not at the jeopardy of an everyday school life or a traditional teenage summer—the pandemic gave me a new freedom and joy that otherwise would not have existed. To me, these times will always be cherished—the relationships I made and the freedom I had will always be remembered fondly.

 

FOOTNOTE: I used Michael Herr’s “new journalism” approach to explain my own personal pandemic story, emulating his immersive reporting style and taking a more philosophical approach to finding meaning. I used immersive reporting by talking about my experiences as if I was a “soldier” in the pandemic; I focused on the day to day of my pandemic experiences. I additionally took a similar philosophical approach as Herr in the name of finding meaning—I narrated how I found meaning in the pandemic. Lastly, my ending paragraph was an emulation of the book’s last chapter with the focus on me reflecting back after my experiences.