I can be quite a high-strung person. In the fall, I dealt with the stress of adjusting to a brand new high school environment: I struggled to navigate both the new building and the new class structure, social groups, and schedules. Juggling daily soccer practices, weekly orchestra rehearsals an hour and a half away, my Scholastic Art & Writing Awards piece, and several summer program applications did not help.

With winter came some breathing room. Now that I knew what the heck high school even was, I could manage myself, my time, and my schedule a bit better.

However, something I realized in the first few days of our 6-week (!) break from school due to the coronavirus is that a constant desire for prestige underlies everything I pursue. In other words, I am not only the product, but the embodiment of a hyper-competitive world. I’ve ingrained into myself the belief that I have to be the best at everything to get into the best schools, and I have to get into the best schools to get the best job, and I have to get the best job to be the best person and have the best possible impact on the world. I’m not sure when this belief firmly materialized — it might’ve been second grade, which is the first recorded instance of me saying my life goal was to graduate from Harvard. In any case, it’s taken the coronavirus literally canceling my academic, extracurricular, and social life for me to understand the presence of this belief. In the constant striving for prestige that occupies my daily life, I never had the self-awareness to realize my fundamentally broken mindset.

To be honest, the free time awarded by the coronavirus has been a twisted sort of respite for me. It is such a relief to start practicing my flute and stop just 30 minutes and deem it good enough, successful, even. It is such a release to be able to practice just one orchestral excerpt the whole practice session and feel satisfied.

It is such a joy to simply be enough for once. I can watch K-pop videos for an hour without crying over the guilt of my “unproductivity.” I can read in the daytime with my cat at my side without my mind constantly drifting to the homework I need to finish, the competition I have this week, the writing contest I still need to enter. I can text people. I can write for fun. I can read again, for God’s sake. I can be human.

I can be Caroline-the-normal-teenage-girl. I don’t have to be prestige-seeking, I-have-to-be-better-than-the-rest, perfect Caroline, whose entire social identity and self-value rely on the unwavering fact that she is the best at everything. I don’t have to practice because of a concert or performance or competition. I can practice because I want to experience music, because I want to enjoy the magical sounds I can create with just my breath and a tube of metal, because I want to improve for myself and nobody else. I can write because I want to feel the joy of words pulsing through my veins, my fingers, my body. I can read because I enjoy it and, frankly, have time for it.

The freedom is overwhelming. I can do things because I want to. Of course, nobody was making me do orchestra, band, solo competitions, 3 clubs, speech and debate, and writing competitions before. I was the one who decided only 2 hours of flute practice counted for anything. I was the one who decided I had to do everything and be better at it than everyone else. But now I’m the one deciding that I can do anything and be as good at it as I want. I don’t have to be motivated by competition against others, by the prospect that someone else may be better than me; I can be motivated by competition with myself, by challenging myself to just be better than I was yesterday. The freedom, the release from the bonds I’d tied myself down with, is incredible. I can breathe again.

So, we can all agree coronavirus sucks. It’s canceled our lives, our livelihoods, and our life-affirming routines. But, at least for me, it’s also been a blessing in disguise. It’s provided me the alone time I needed in order to realize just how broken my belief systems were previously, and it’s given me the opportunity to fix them. For once, I’m motivated by happiness, not prestige.

You have time now. We all do. I hope you’re able to take a moment to just ask yourself, “How do I feel now? How do I feel normally? What’s the difference, if any, in emotion, stress, motivation, happiness, and fulfillment? Is there anything I want to change knowing this information?”

Or, like me, just have insomnia, realize at 3 a.m. that you’ve been chasing the wrong prize all your life, have a therapy session about this with a stuffed animal on your bed, and then vent all about it on your blog. However you go about it, discover yourself a little during this break. You might be astonished by what you find. (: