Mira Schwarz

“One of the big things especially in high school was dealing with my learning disabilities. It’s really difficult in classes; dealing with 504s and tests and group projects where I just don’t learn the same way as other people and they don’t quite understand it. In the beginning of quarantine, I think it was actually okay because they weren’t assigning too much schoolwork and I did all of the assignments. I went to the optional zooms, [and] gave it my all because I wasn’t doing anything. But the start of this school year has been hard —  transferring over and learning how to deal with ADD and test anxiety in the virtual world. It’s also been interesting to see how the struggles I’ve had all of my life are starting to play into other people’s lives. Like really bad test anxiety or procrastination, not being able to focus at all, feeling like you don’t understand anything and you can’t try. It’s affecting a lot more people than it was before. And it brought back a lot of emotions because a lot of these people have, not necessarily bullied, but they’ve been nasty to me about it. You know like, “Oh, you’re so slow” or “Damn how do you not understand this.” And I didn’t know how to feel about it at first because I was like “Wow. Now you can sort of get it.” And it definitely put me at somewhat of an advantage in schooling because I know how to work with this. I’ve been living with this for a while. It’s just a different situation of how to work with it now. But since I have all the skills that I’ve been building up since I was six, it’s different in a way. But yeah, it’s weird, very weird.”