Photo Courtesy of Hofstra University
“During this unprecedented time…” How exhausted I’ve become of that phrase. We’ve all heard it at least a hundred times for a multitude of reasons since the coronavirus pandemic began. The thing is that nothing feels all that unprecedented anymore, just increasingly unfortunate and inconvenient. In the past few months, the world has become so familiar with adjusting to the unfamiliar that by now, students have adjusted to and accepted this semester for what it is.
During the summer, I became so tired of my daily routine of commuting from my bed to the living room couch, only to sulk over the untimely disaster that life had become. The extent of my quarantine accomplishments had been restricted to how many views I could get on a TikTok, how fast I could finish a season of whatever series I was binge-watching, and how many new ingredients I could get away with adding to my banana muffin recipe before it became as overwhelmed as I was; except I wasn’t overwhelmed with nuts and vanilla, but with sadness.
Somewhere between the non-stop sense of loneliness and the repeated rehashing of trauma after witnessing more and more injustices graphically in the news and social media, I felt pieces of my soul being chipped away, as well as less motivation to do anything. The world was seeming to be comprised of nothing more than hopelessness and despair. I hated myself for the couch potato that I had become and couldn’t wait to come back to school.
I knew that college life wouldn’t be the same as what I had known it to be before the world turned upside down, but I hoped that it would give me the structure that my life was so terribly lacking. I thought that coming back to campus would allow me to retrieve the piece of myself that I had lost with almost magical immediacy. I thought that being in the proximity of more people and having more work to do would be all I needed to get me back to who I was pre-pandemic.
By mid-September it would become very clear that things would not be so easy. In that first full month of school, I was disappointed that my comeback to campus life wasn’t what I’d hoped. I was overwhelmed with everything I had thrown myself into to make up for the unproductive lost time while in quarantine. I was inexplicably still lonely, even while surrounded by an arguably dangerous number of people and friends. I was also weirdly homesick, when less than a month ago, I had been sick of home. Sophomore year kind of felt like it came out of nowhere, even though my entire quarantine had been leading up to it. All of a sudden, the class of 2024 had replaced us as the new kids on the block. College became old news, and that’s scary, because the world seems less forgiving of our mistakes with each passing year of adulthood.
Outside of this bubble of a campus, the world continued to implode in every way that it possibly could. Whether or not you wore a piece of protective cloth over your face had become politicized. Simply stating that Black lives matter became a divisive, controversial statement. The world was literally on fire, and yet we continued existing as if it wasn’t. Nothing made sense anymore, or maybe as these negative phenomena continued to pile on at an increasingly rapid pace, it just became apparent that nothing ever had. The universe was done taking into consideration what we thought we could handle and seemed to just throw the worst at us. Whether or not we survived it was our problem.
By October, I was still unsure of who I was in this worn out “unprecedented” time. However, I did have a realization, and it was that the task at hand isn’t to regain the old sense of self that I had once known, but rather to develop this unfamiliar version of myself under the new context of the times in which we are living. I only wish I’d had that epiphany at the start of the pandemic. Unfortunately, this may be the best that things are ever going to be again, and rather than allowing that to be discouraging, I decided to turn it into a wakeup call. The world was a horrible place even before the coronavirus, and even then there were many things that I took for granted.
I never expected that every way that I used to show friendly physical affection would have to be replaced with air: air hugs, air high-fives, air kisses. I never expected that I would spend months not being able to sit down anywhere without obsessively sanitizing and wiping down every surface and foreign object that I touch. I feel nostalgia when I think about my most uneventful hangouts, simply because I could breathe freely without the anxiety of catching or transmitting a potentially deadly virus. So, in reflecting on all the unexpected turns that this year has taken, I decided to learn from my losses and relish in what I have left to enjoy instead of spending all my time yearning to go back to a time that no longer exists.
In November I started implementing this lesson into my own life. With climate change on our tails, I’m finding a greater appreciation for sunny days, knowing that they may be numbered. I’ve also made time to read for my own enjoyment again. I listen to music and optimistically fantasize about the future. I have refused to be life’s punching bag, and I’m instead finding my place in this version of the world. There are so many things in life that aren’t restricted by the current circumstances. Doing all this doesn’t make everything okay, or even close, but it adds a certain something to life in a year that seems to only be taking things away. No matter how difficult things get, you can always find small pockets of good in life.
