Moreover, due to COVID-19, it was difficult to make new friends with faces behind masks.
So, it started there when I was just like … this is hard, like, this is hard to do school in these conditions,” she said to WBPF News. “It was the best thing for helping me transition during COVID time when it was really hard.” School life is different from what most movies show. others have to suffer through deep loneliness where they struggle to find community and support While some get to cruise through it in their main character era. For Sawyer Tinsley, going to school was overwhelming and lonely. Her first year of middle school was not going well since most of her old friends had shifted to a different school district in Jupiter, Florida. “You would have to be six feet away, you couldn’t really speak, you had masks on, you couldn’t really see people.
Because waiting there was her latest foster kitten from Palm Beach Purrs, but one day, when she opened her bedroom door, her mood instantly lifted.
I’ll wake up at night to do it, but this is the least consequential one to do,” Wilkerson said. Every day she would rush to her home from school and head straight to her room, sad and frustrated. Sawyer loved every one of her foster kittens. Not only did the kitten find a forever home, but she also got another furry feline to help ease her loneliness during a strange school year. One afternoon, something clicked. Sawyer realised that many of her old friends had also expressed their own feelings of isolation. “Hugging a kitten makes me feel so relaxed and less lonely. Maybe it would help my friends, too,” she thought. Thus, to help other middle school girls facing similar challenges, she created a club called ‘PAUSE’, inviting them to her home to spend time with foster kittens. “And then they just come and we put them downstairs and then they can just run around. The kids play with them and talk about their, like, stressors (they) have been going through in middle school, cause that’s when it starts to like, amp up for elementary school,” Sawyer explained. Florida Atlantic University student Chloee Wilkerson, who was taking a break from studying at PetSmart in Palm Beach Gardens, where the foster kittens are located, shared her experience. “It’s my favourite coping mechanism.