April 24, 2020 (10:52 pm)

 

It is hard to know what day it is. March felt like the longest month, a month stretched grotesquely and impossibly, any sense of stability uprooted before it could settle. I lived in fear for that week, or I'm actually not really so sure about the lengths of time of it really. It was not if, to me, but when. Suddenly—or really, it wasn't sudden at all, but there is no adequate mental preparation for a global pandemic—the world transformed, life morphing into something unrecognizable. Even Americans were forced to understand they are not invincible, that we can be hurt too. Every day there was something new to dread, and I felt myself growing numb with each passing day, as everything and everyone I have known, foolishly taking for granted before even though I did know the world could fall apart at any moment, crumbled around me.

 

Days felt longer, time more abundant than ever before. The first few weeks were chaotic. People couldn't wrap their heads around the uncertainty they were privileged to feel immune from before everything ground to a halt. The things everyone, society, had always considered important were proven pathetic.

 

And then, somehow, after days in quarantine, of entering my living room to a new friend crying, succumbing to the unfamiliar pain of not understanding or knowing what the future held,  things shifted. Because eventually, sooner or later, we recalibrate, finding new routines, a new normal that doesn’t feel right, exactly, but it does feel okay.

 

In the December of my junior year, studying for finals, I really tried to start early, to force myself to be diligent, to stop procrastinating, to stop distracting myself. I had worked really hard in my econ class, trying to achieve despite my brain's every effort to rebel, to reject all that is not easy and does not come naturally, and say that I did not care. But I hadn't, and I had successfully pulled off a B+ in the class. The relief of this exam, however, was short-lived as I had to confront all I had neglected in lieu of econ.

 

I had to finish up my Writing Minor Gateway project. I had an exam at eight in the morning the day after my friend and I drove the ten hours home, and hadn’t looked at it. And on top of finals, I had to pack my room, all my belongings, all alone. I never had before, because unpacking and packing are some of the projects I find too inexplicably overwhelming, impossible to even conceptualize. Every time I attempt, my mom eventually helps me after the inevitable panic attack or uncontrollable tears that are so uncharacteristic, so rare of me to allow my emotions to show so on your face. It felt like my stomach was sinking when I thought about it, of how distinctly alone and unable I felt, of how impossibly the task loomed before me, my heart racing before I could even begin.

 

I also had a paper due in a class I was theoretically interested in, but my brain often refused it, too, somehow distracted and carried away, consumed by any thoughts other than the practiced, calming drone of the professor at the front of the room. I had to work hard to stay actively engaged. I sat in my bed, feeling worse with each passing minute as I failed to find the words I needed, the flashing cursor haunting me, demanding, telling me I had been wrong to think I was good at writing, audacious to think this was my greatest skill. It insisted that I really was untalented and unremarkable; good writers were good at writing anything, and so the skill so central to my identity, my entire life, must really be a fluke. Perhaps the instincts that screamed I was actually just mediocre, I wasn't really a good writer, were right after all.

 

I called my friends, my mom, the anxiety mounting as the minutes towards the paper deadline ticked down and the sun dimmed in the sky. I emailed my teacher, explaining my diagnosis generalized anxiety disorder and particular difficulty packing on top of the stress of finals, and I felt okay because how could anyone say no. my professor responding asking if i could stop by her office to discuss this—I blinked as i read these words, wondering if she had even read my email because how, possibly, did she think it fair to ask me to take the time to walk through the biting below-freezing cold to her office and speak to her when I was stressed, most of all, because I had so much to do and so little time to so it.  I trembled as I explained this and offered a phone call instead, dialed the numbers holding my breath, trying not to disassociate from the ringing tone to think about how really, it was ironic, comedic even, that she was asking such notoriously anxiety-inducing tasks of someone desperately reaching out I felt too debilitated to not succumb to my anxiety.

 

I told her I understood as she explained to me she could only give me until the end of the day but no more, that mental health accommodations had to be registered through the student disability services center and appropriately addressed earlier in the semester. It wasn’t her fault, she wasn’t trying to be malicious, and I had brought this on myself—I knew all this. Yet, I couldn’t help but feel like something more distinct had happened, that I had finally confessed part of my true self, I had admitted that I was different, and it didn’t matter, I was denied, I had to figure it out, like I usually did.

 

I swallowed and thanked her and returned to work, finally churning out words as if released by the adrenaline or frustration that they were asking so much of someone who was desperately admitting she couldn’t do it all, she wasn't able, and she feels like her brain is distinctly different, broken even, because life cannot possibly be this hard for everyone in these small but all-consuming ways, because she must not be intelligent and talented and able to somehow always figure it out at the last minute, to maintain a facade of calm, to force rational thought through the thoughts racing way faster than how everyone else must think, until she finished and laughed at the fact that she had ever worried in the first place, and moved on with her life.

 

I tell this story not because it is hugely important or particularly unique either. As conscious of mental health as the university is, feeling too anxious, too distracted, too upset about the failures of the world around me was never a valid excuse, only gaining vaguely so once I was diagnosed and registered, once the university had formally pathologized me and declared me worthy of accommodating.

 

Once the pandemic hit, I felt like everyone else finally understood, maybe. I felt the world pause, too, and worry about the people across the globe who we will never know but who we know are suffering. I will probably always find reasons to be anxious, as much as I wish I did not.

 

and even though the world was eerily, drastically different, I felt myself breathe out. because even though the world was different, and screaming out in pain, I didn't feel like the only one who felt it. 

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I am certain that I will continue reconciling things, important and minute, for the rest of my life. This project is split into before, during, and after, because originally, I sought to document my last semester of college, what I saw as the official conclusion of my childhood, the end of the beginning or maybe the beginning of the end. But my biggest reconciliation of all is perhaps that sometimes life and the world do not go as we plan them, as we anticipate them.

 

Before, during and after have come to mean something different, my life separated not how I thought it would be, or how I split it in my mind, but how events entirely out of our control determined it instead. If I were self centered enough to consider this pandemic as something unfortunate to me specifically, rather than a tragic inevitably occurring in the world in which I am still far better off than most, it would almost feel as if we were being mocked for our certainty, for the graduation date that stood in our calendars for over four years, for the gravity that we gave the final days of college as if they were any more consequential than any of the others.

 

Something fundamentally shifted in the world, in my life and everyone else's, when coronavirus began taking its toll. And it is still going on, it is still very much during. But with each passing day I've felt myself adjusting to a new normal, my brain reframing what I expect and know my life to be, finally allowing the news that has been so shocking to sink in as a new unfortunate fact of life. 

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It is not after, but for now, it is okay.

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