Children and young people have been slammed by this pandemic, but for many of us, it's also taken a while for us to realise our own resilience.

In the first few lockdowns, I didn't feel like I had a purpose or anything to do anymore and was isolated and alone.

I love sport and every week I play football, hockey and volleyball, so the loss of them made me fall into a really bad place, where I felt I couldn't talk to anyone or do anything. I was trapped in my house with very little communication with the outside world.

I realised I needed to find a way to keep myself connected to the sporting community.

So, I reached out to my local sports club, league and regional sports assembly.

Together, we organised a program for junior players to get back into sport in summer. While the comp was unfortunately cancelled due to COVID-19, this step allowed me to pull myself back into my community and have a purpose.

Some of you won't be able to relate to this story, as not everyone plays sport or feels attached to their team, but I want you to compare this to something you lost during lockdown.

COVID-19 has taken something away from us all, and we have had to adapt to lockdowns and stay together.

Another COVID-19 challenge has been a lack of support. We all need support during COVID-19, whether it's from our work, school, friends or community.

Unfortunately, I've also seen a lot of my friends, peers and teammates fall apart during lockdown, or even worse, I didn't hear from them at all.

Falling out of social life was such a common thing for us during COVID-19, yet it wasn't that well recognised and was rarely spoken about.

The friends who have excelled during lockdown have done so purely because they had people they were able to talk to and lean on.

Even now, my school and community don't know how to give us the right support that will help us stay connected and healthy.

Schools should be friendly and consistent with their students, and support options should seem genuine and useful. We need to make sure we're there for each other, and not let someone drift away.

The other major challenge for young people is a lack of reliable information and certainty.

Since young people look online for their information, they don't always find the most reliable news sources and the pandemic has only made it worse.

We've had different sources telling us different lockdown conditions.

Social media spreads drama quite quickly, so stories about vaccinations going wrong or masks being useless spread faster than they would otherwise.

This causes young people to get the wrong information about serious issues, and have mindsets about the pandemic that put themselves and others at risk.

When we can't find reliable and truthful information online, we turn to our parents, guardians or teachers. Here, the issue becomes inconsistency.

In one day, three of my teachers explained how we were affected by the opening up of vaccine rollouts to 16-30 year olds, and the options that we had. That day, we got three different opinions and three different sets of information.

We need to provide young people with reliable, objective and consistent information without opening up opportunities for backlash or fake news.

If we can find a way to provide people with information in a way that's accessible and makes sense to them, young people's responses to the pandemic will become clearer and more understanding.

A major positive I've seen come from the pandemic is the acknowledgement of different learning styles.

During classes, we don't always have to do the work right that second, we're allowed to take a break and do it in half an hour or during lunch. Students who would prefer a three day weekend are able to knock out their work earlier in the week and take a day off. The borders we had around classes and schoolwork have been removed, and in response we've seen different students flourish.

The pandemic has strengthened some young people's resilience and optimism. We've had to deal with hard times by finding positives, which seemed almost impossible at the time. When hit with bad news and cancelations we've had to turn around and reconstruct it.

When things we've worked so hard to achieve get cancelled by something out of our control, we can feel hopeless, like we should give up. This pandemic has proved to many of us that a lockdown doesn't last forever, and we'll get the opportunity to try again.

We may need to stop and adapt, and maybe switch around some ideas or take a different approach, but if a deadly virus can't knock us down completely, then what can.

Lifeline: 13 11 14