Meet Esteban.

I’m Esteban Mendoza. I’m 12. I definitely like in-person school more and I really missed it while I was online. I didn’t get to see my friends as often because most of them live out of town, and they drive a little ways to get to school. So I don’t really get to see them as much outside of school. That really sucked because I wasn’t able to just, like, communicate with my friends because I don’t have a phone or any way to access them other than school. Unless it’s through my parents. So I wasn’t really able to spend time with them. And that was just… really bad.

“It’s very boring, very, very boring, because I wasn’t able to do anything.”
Because I couldn’t go out. I couldn’t, you know, do stuff outside of my house, I was constricted mostly to my house. And other than video games and school, there’s really nothing that I could do.

“I was playing three sports during school before coronavirus,”
…and that was cross country, wrestling, and football. And I was doing all three of them during school, and in the summers I did swim team and wrestling. But, as soon as coronavirus hit, all of that stopped, and I think that’s why — I call it “coronavirus weight,” I gained about 10 pounds in a month. I slimmed down! I lost it now.

Outside of school I really like riding my bike. I like going camping a lot with my uncle. (My parents don’t really like camping.) Because of coronavirus, I haven’t been able to go fishing as much because when coronavirus hit, everyone went fishing. Yeah. And then, so they closed down a lot of those ponds because there’s too much people and they had to put Covid restrictions on them, on the ponds and lakes as well. So that cut off one of my favorite things to do. Other than that, it’s mostly go spend time with my friends, which I couldn’t do because of coronavirus. And sports, which I also couldn’t do because of coronavirus.

“The thing that really helped me was just to think that it couldn’t last forever.”
‘Cause, just like all good things come to an end, all bad things come to an end. So, just the hope that, or just the knowing that when it came to an end, if I made it through, it’d be better. And I’d be able to do all of the things I liked again, made me want to keep going so I could do those things again. You know, before I couldn’t do them anymore.

Living a life of no regrets
I like watching documentaries. Sometimes, not a lot of them, but a lot of people say that they have regrets in life. And in biographies they say if they could have done what they loved more before they got too old for it, or, just physical restrictions. They say a lot of the time that if they would have known that there was a time when they couldn’t do it anymore, they would have kept doing it while they had the chance. And because of me wanting to do it when I had the chance, I wanted to push through coronavirus. Because If I didn’t push through, then I wouldn’t be able to do those things again.

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