It has been over a year since the U.S. entered Coronavirus-related lockdown. For me, everything changed on March 13th when I left UConn for spring break. At that point, I really believed that students would leave for two weeks, come back to campus and everything would be business as usual. A couple of days before I left, I met up with friends and we all joked about the situation we were finding ourselves in and said our “goodbyes,” but nothing could have prepared us for how life was about to change.
Everything just sounded so surreal; the looming threat of a pandemic felt like something straight out of a sci-fi movie and I was one of the lead roles. Unfortunately, things quickly snapped into reality when I came home in March and the first person I knew got sick with symptoms of COVID-19. It was then that I knew I wouldn’t be going back to campus anytime soon. I had so many questions, the world had so many questions, and there were simply no answers.
Flash forward a year later and I sometimes forget what normal life was like because it feels like an entire lifetime ago. After the first semester of online school, I swore I would be done with it. Now, I still wake up and walk two feet from my bed to my desk where I will sometimes spend seven or more hours on my laptop attending class and doing work. In the winter season especially, I felt like I had no real rest from online classes until the holiday break.
When things first shut down, everyone took the extra time they suddenly had on their hands to do things they never made time for before. I started baking, working out more, and reading every night. Eventually, I had to build a “new normal” and my college classes became the priority. The cyclical routine I found myself in has been really tough on my mental and physical health, to say the least.
I had to make changes. And I still make changes now to help me cope with a year of online school, a year of this new normal. The Coronavirus has made me appreciate the things I took for granted before— hugging, going to parties with my friends, dinners at the dining halls, long walks around campus, and even going to in-person classes. This pandemic has also made me appreciate the small things I have now.
The truth is, college students like me have been through hell and back during this pandemic, and the issues we have encountered are not going away just yet. But the promise of a post-vaccinated world is exciting. The story of one year into a pandemic is a story of resilience more than anything, and I realized that through all the ups and downs life is going to keep moving on. I am now in a place where I have a lot of things to look forward to no matter what my world is going to look like in a few months or a few years.