Happy Halloween!
This week has been pretty uneventful for me. Despite the holiday I’ve still got mountains of homework to do, so my celebrating has been cut a little bittersweet. It’s often at times like these-- holidays steeped and surrounded by childhood nostalgia-- that I get a chance to reflect on my own age, and how time seems to be slipping faster and faster away.
Halloween on campus has been very festive-- especially after last year. This entire weekend people have been walking around in fun costumes, eager to dress up and go places after a year of isolation when even the thought of celebrating felt taboo. Gagged LC put on an amazing drag show Friday night, and to be honest it was a little surreal attending an event that felt so normal. Masks were still firmly in place, except for the performers, but it still felt eerily like pre-pandemic times.
As much as I want to ‘return to normal’ or ‘build back better’, sometimes it strikes me that I’m not quite ready to let 2020 go. In a few months, it will be 2022, despite the fact that I’ve only recently come around to 2021. It seems to me that the world should be changed somehow. I shouldn’t be able to do ‘normal’ things, like sitting in a cafe to do my homework, or going to drag shows and Halloween parties.
Wait, my brain keeps saying. How can we just pretend like nothing happened when millions of people have died? How can we just resume our lives?
I know that the pandemic cautions won’t remain in place forever. In fact, I hope that they won’t. I am eager for the day when I can go about my business without worrying about distancing or masks or the lingering fear that someone I don’t know is breathing too close to my face. But this pandemic has fundamentally changed me, how I think about the world, and how I live my life. Even if the world returns to ‘normal’, I don’t think that I ever will.
Life at Lewis and Clark is still pretty mask-heavy. We have a 98% vaccination rate, and we’re following all CDC guidelines. As long as COVID-19 remains a threat to our community, I’m sure everyone here will be willing and eager to follow all directions to keep people as safe as possible. But there are times when I forget the pandemic. When I put a mask on my face because I’m conditioned to do so before I leave my room. There are times when I wonder about the person I would be without the pandemic, and about its lasting effects on the people around me. For so long, it seemed like we were too in the middle of it to consider what might happen after. But now, almost two years later, I question if I’ve given myself enough room to process just exactly what the world has been going through.
Anyway, these are just rambling thoughts of a college student who’s education will forever be marked by COVID-19. I hope anyone reading this is staying safe, taking care of themselves, and giving themselves a break, because, as much as we might kid ourselves otherwise, we’re still going through these unprecedented times.