All I can do these days is just go along with this new reality. If someone had told me last year that 2020 was going to the year of the plague, the year of isolation and standing in line-ups outside of grocery stores watching people scream at each other—from two metres apart, in parking lots—over who has dibs on the last package of toilet paper, I would have said, “2020—you can keep it.”
I mean, seriously, though. Watching our lives and the world we are accustomed to crumble before our eyes has definitely not been an easy feat. I haven’t generally thought of myself as a hugely social person. I spend a lot of time with a few select loved ones. Which include two cats. But suddenly not going to work and having my schooling become virtual was something I personally never comprehended.
We all know a little history; we all know about the various plagues that have haunted our planet in different decades and centuries. However, it just seemed like in the 21st Century we were supposed to be passed that. We were supposed to be guarded; we were in the time of vaccines, of life-changing cures and inventions. We were the children of awareness and hope. We weren’t going to have to seriously go through a pandemic.
It must be a joke, I thought when I first heard. Or if we are going to shut down, it must only be for a few days, tops! So, our classes are now online, and I am not sure about this at all. I realize that we have to do what is said. I also know that the instructors are as upset as the students, and that we are all in the same wobbly lifeboat.
This is a huge transition, for me anyway. Going to class is my lifeblood. It fills me with the fuel I need to make me a whole person, no joke. And although subject matter is very important, the class experience is truly what keeps me excited and moving. The chemistry between students and teacher, all strumming with opinions and feelings and curiosity? That kind of experience is the meat of the college experience, and I can’t find it online.
Plus, how will we have interaction and office time online? How will we run to the counsellor’s office if suddenly overwhelmed with dread? How will we cry in the arms of an understanding campus barista when we have suddenly burst into tears in the coffee-shop line-up during exam week?
I’m, all of a sudden, very aware of how much I depend on human connection. I shake hands with people when I first meet them. I often talk to people in the line-ups of my favourite coffee shops. If I see someone who looks sad or upset, even if I don’t know them, I might touch their shoulder or pat their back. It’s really weird to have all these gestures of human connection be banned, and to have a two-metre personal-space bubble surrounding each of us, an order of direction now to follow at all times.
It really seems sometimes as if we are all in our own George Orwell novel. Tonight, a woman yelled at me for going the wrong direction in a grocery aisle. Really, she yelled. Maybe I should have punched her bubble. I didn’t, of course; I know everyone is stressed out.
I was actually kind of glad she talked to me at all.