It’s officially been one year since COVID-19 touched this campus and things started getting real very fast.
Looking back on the past year, I went through a lot of changes that helped me feel like a more fully formed person. This column is going to be some reflections on the timeline of events that happened over the course of the year that influenced changes in my life. So buckle up for a chill ride down quarantine lane.
Whenever I left campus for spring break last year, I had a hunch that we weren’t coming back, and I suspect a lot of other people did as well. I carried on through spring break and kept a close eye on the situation unfolding. I was in North Carolina visiting my aunt at the time, so there was a very real possibility that the airlines were going to shut down and I would be stuck there for months. Fortunately, I made it back safe and sound to my home in Tulsa, where I stayed for the entirety of quarantine.
Luckily, I have not caught COVID-19 (at least not that I am aware of) and no people in my family have gotten seriously sick or have died when they had it. Me and my family are a lot luckier and a lot more fortunate than over half a million other American families that have suffered losses due to the pandemic.
However, I have had my fair share of ups and downs with COVID-19, just as most everyone has. I remember the day when my dad came home early from work and told me he was let go. The situation really started to spiral for me and my family. We all deliberated back and forth about who needed to get a job where and when. My mom (a registered nurse) even considered flying to New York to work on the front lines to raise enough money for us. Again, luckily, my family is ok, and my mother continued her job as a high school nurse (although the horror stories I have heard from her make me think she is on the front lines).
Then, there was quarantine. Quarantine for me was lonely but refreshing. I am a person who likes to be reclusive, so the quarantine lifestyle fits my own pretty well. The biggest downside is that I was forced to interact with other people 100% of the time, which does not fit my reclusive lifestyle. At the time, life was getting a bit too much for me to handle, and pumping the brakes on it helped me work through it. It allowed me to meditate on the problems in my life and think of solutions to them, a process which I replicate for new problems that come my way.
The Black Lives Matter movement also helped realign myself politically. At the time of the murder of George Floyd, I was circling down a nihilistic political spiral. I thought that anything in politics is pointless and that the people in power will find any way to screw you over and there is nothing we can do about it. But after seeing people in the BLM movement stand up for themselves and strive for a better world, I couldn’t help but feel optimistic about the future again. I felt like I had a new political purpose, and I had a concrete way of achieving those goals.
The end of summer snuck up on me in 2020. I realized we were going back to in-person classes as the COVID-19 cases were only going up. I was mortified by the idea that students could spread the disease quickly on campus, and we might even have deaths either directly or indirectly from campus. Fortunately, OCU has been able to avoid serious spread of COVID-19 on campus, and over the course of this year, I have only had to self-isolate once.
With being back to OCU, I was able to get back into a schedule and put everything I had learned over the summer to use, and so far it has been working very well. This year has presented challenges in which I don’t think I will ever see again in my lifetime (or at least I hope I won’t). I am glad I have come out of this year as a better person, and I hope I will continue to improve without a pandemic raging across the country.
Leave a Reply