Honestly, the concept of “normalcy” has been on my mind far too much recently, especially when everyone anxiously talks about how everything will return to the way it was before. Let’s be realistic: the world will never be the same. As with any groundbreaking, unprecedented event, the world adapts and changes, leaving behind our old habits and plans. I know this (or, at least, I tell myself over and over that I know this), but understanding the world will never be the same is a very, very hard concept to grasp, especially when I was already planning on finding a “new normal” after I graduated. But, here we are, in week five (or six, for some of us, but it definitely feels much longer), still attempting to put together the pieces and answer “how can we possibly move forward?”
Watching the world slowly lose its mind was definitely not what I had predicted for my senior year, but even before the world began to fall apart, I had already been thrown into a far different “normal” than I was expecting to walk into at the beginning of this school year. Within two months, I was told I would be graduating over a year early, I did not have a choice about taking filler classes, and to figure out what I would be doing once I walked across the stage in May. After crying and panicking far longer than I care to admit, I put my big girl pants on and got to work: I found an amazing internship for the summer, applied and got accepted into graduate school with a continuation on my scholarships (Bless financial aid for letting me use the last year’s worth of my scholarships towards a Master’s degree!), and was hard at work finding a way to balance an overload of courses with my last internship before graduating.
And then, the world stopped.
As the world came to a slow and grinding halt, it honestly didn’t seem real. Up until the second week of March, classes were still running smoothly, my internship still expected me to come in and work with the educational enrichment program with kids every day, and restaurants were still going strong. Even when classes stopped being held in person (three days into the beginning of a brand-new quarter!), I was still going to work and planning on walking in the spring. Everything closed, one by one, a domino of fear-inducing measures which made life far more stressful than I ever thought possible. All at once, it seemed like anything I could remotely plan for was out the window. Even the waffle house was closed; when that happens, you know it must be the end of the world.
Yet, here I am. Still treading along the beaten path.
Yes, all these changes have made life hard. It’s so hard to find the motivation to continue trying to do my schoolwork, to wake up early on the weekdays to attend zooms, to try to find a summer internship or job now that my original one had to be canceled. Nobody said finding our way through unprecedented times would be easy (though, many people sure thought it would be). But if we lose that motivation, that one little spark to keep going, we’ll never make it to the next step. There truly is no “returning to normal” because our old normal won’t work. We have to sit down, fight the insanely convincing voice telling us to “quit,” and work through until we find a way to keep going.
Remember though, it’s okay to be sad and angry at the world.
Things will not be the same. We’ve lost so much: time with friends and family, memories, jobs, the list goes on and on. It’s healthy to go through these emotions and mourn what we’ve lost, but what’s not healthy is to stay in that mindset. Come out and see where you can go from here. What do you miss the most? What have you been putting ahead of your own mental health? Where can you improve? Take these moments in which the world has basically limited us to self-growth and find what brings you peace. The world will return (albeit far differently than it looked before) and we will be okay. Don’t let this blip kill your spirit; let’s grow and keep on wading forward, for if we give up and let the waters take us down, we will never be able to come back up for air again.