ITALY. June 2021. Fara Gerda d'Aadda (BERGAMO). In June 2021, Anna sits in a park, on her phone, in her home village in the province of Bergamo, Italy. Anna, 14, is one of the winning essayists of a literary competition launched by the Lombardy Regional Board of Psychologists, in collaboration with the Lombardy Guarantor Authority for Childhood and Adolescence. The competition invited secondary school students across the province to write about their pandemic experiences as a way of healing the mental health effects of social isolation during Italy’s nationwide lockdown. Anna wrote profoundly of the fear, helplessness and despair within the village in her entry, titled ‘I wish I had never been born.” In her essay, COVID-19 came to life as a phantom that could not understand why death and illness followed its trail.

“I now think that COVID-19 has left a very profound change in the way I live,” Anna says. “It did not help me to find a way to express emotions. I now fear physical contact, and I'm conscious that my reactions to the world have very much changed. I lost trust…but maybe this is not because of COVID-19. It is now difficult for me to open myself to the world. Before, I was different.”