The last of my teenage years

The pandemic took a lot from people over the last two years. Some lost their loved ones, others lost opportunities, while I also lost one thing I could never get back—the last of my teenage years.

I remember celebrating my 18th birthday in December 2019, days before the news about a virus spread around different platforms of social media. Personally, it was one that I did not give too much attention to. In my mind, there was nothing that could stop me from enjoying my legality before I turned into an “actual adult” at the age of 20.

I was supposed to enjoy my very first concert festival in Clark in March 2020. I had everything ready—from my supposed outfit, the friends I will be taking with me, and the amount of energy I’ll be using to scream for my favorite band back then. I was just about to mark the start of my adulthood and one of the highlights of my last two years as a teenager. Well, until it got canceled a week prior because the lockdown happened.

Bummer.

I think it was a common thing for everyone to experience a brief period of denial that everything would go back to normal easily back then. Every day, I checked on the news while reassuring myself that the situation would not last until college started.

Those were false hopes. I lived the next two years stuck at home, celebrating a pandemic 20th birthday, without even experiencing any of the things I looked forward to when I turned 18.

Everything was done virtually over the last two years of my teenage life. It was boring. But in late 2020, a simulation game caught my interest. Sims 4 for PC became available to download for free. As someone who was desperate to find a hobby that holiday, I took up the chance the soonest I could. My dad eventually got me and my sister a copy of the game.

Sims 4 fascinated me. It took the majority of my school break while I figured out how to control the life of the simulation version of myself in the game.

I started with a teenage sim who had just graduated from high school. I patterned her physical attributes after myself. She was a cartoon version of myself who was living a way cooler teenage life than I was.

She was a social butterfly with many new friends from the neighborhood. She became my coping mechanism while I wallowed in despair for being unable to enjoy the same experiences she had. She attended college face-to-face and met people at the university without having to send an awkward “Hi :)” via Messenger.

I thought, “Sheesh, girlie was living the life!”

It was both upsetting and comforting how Sims 4 actually enabled me to somehow live the moments I could have enjoyed during my remaining two teenage years. Every day, I looked forward to opening the application just to be able to see what a certain day had in store for me. The game became my only source of excitement.

On some days, my sister and I end up talking about our Sims characters as if they were actual people that we knew. Sometimes, we discuss their days as if we were the ones who had actually gone through them. My mom would often look at us with confused stares. She probably felt bad that her daughters had to experience what she and my dad referred to as one of the “peaks of adulthood” that way.

Partying late at night with college friends, starting college in person, and making friends with anyone that you may come across inside the college campus are only some of the things that Sims 4 allowed me to experience while only seated in front of my laptop. These are exclusive moments that I could have lived if only the pandemic did not happen. She could have been who I turned out to be if only chance played fair.

Eventually, I had to let all that virtual life go. When I turned 20, I had to accept that it was what it was. There was no way I could be an 18-year-old and a first-year student all over again. I had to accept that I made friends online, spent two years of my college virtually, and lost my teenage years while stuck at home. Acceptance eventually spared me from getting lured deeper into the game.

Nonetheless, Sims 4 kind of saved me from simply crying over these lost chances every day. Somehow, I was able to live the last of my teenage years through my virtual self who gave me a walkthrough on how possibly my last two years could have turned out to be.

People had different coping mechanisms amid the losses that they experienced during the pandemic, and Sims 4 surely played a big part in mine.

Nicole Olalia, 21, is a third-year journalism student at the University of Santo Tomas.