Scott F., Kettering Fairmont High School
Don't Go It Alone
Dottie Yeck’s philosophy of Being Good + Doing Good = Having Fun + Being Happy is true in too many ways to count, but, in my life, it truly applies to me and my youngest sister the most.
For basically my whole life, my daily routine consisted of waking up, going to school, doing homework, and then playing video games for the rest of my waking hours. This was my routine every day of my life up until the end of eighth grade when everyone went into quarantine.
I lost contact with my friends. We couldn’t talk at lunch or play video games together. This may seem like a bad thing, but in all honesty, I’m really happy that this happened. Since I had no one to play video games with, I ended up trying out so many new things. I got back into archery, drawing, and even writing, but nothing was really all that exciting because I was still doing everything by myself.
As I said earlier, my daily routine consisted of just school and video games, but what I didn’t say is that when I played video games for all my waking hours, that stopped me from hanging out with my family, specifically my youngest sister.
As I got back into archery, drawing, writing, and everything else, I became less caught up in my “gaming career”, I realized that my youngest sister, Lexi, was bored a lot. I can only assume that she had been this bored since before quarantine since all she is really allowed to do is read, but I had only recently started noticing it. Around that time, I began asking her to come play outside with me, and she would always happily say yes. We would go to the skatepark on a weekly basis and went outside to fight each other with foam swords. She always got so excited when we went outside no matter what we were doing.
If being in quarantine has taught me anything it’s that occasionally you need to stop what you’re doing and do something with someone else to make them happy. Every once in a while, stop what you’re doing and take a look around. Take a look at what everyone else is doing and look at them. Look at their faces and see how they feel. Are they lonely and bored or are they already content? If they’re bored, help them out and do something with them. Whether it be just talking to them or helping them with a fun project it doesn’t really matter. What really matters is that doing something fun together will always be better than doing it alone.
