If I’m being completely honest, I’m really sad right now. I miss walking into the cafeteria for a Camosun muffin, listening to the really odd segments of conversation you catch on campus, and being a part of the Camosun community.
There’s no end in sight. I’m not going to sit here and tell you it will be the same one day; I don’t know that it will be, but I do know that it will be okay. Part of being okay is being okay with sometimes not being okay.
The initial shock of life being completely uprooted is gone. It’s worn off and been replaced with some sort of far-off distant ache for normalcy.
Normalcy doesn’t exist. Not right now. It’s too new, too uncertain to be qualified as that. What exists is a really odd sort of routine that gnaws away at you.
Acceptance often gets mistaken for complacency in my mind, because for the first time in my life, I’m not exactly sure what it is we all will have to accept.
It’s hard to work, learn, and function right now. I just know I’ll never take a bookstore or an incredibly crowded Fisher foyer for granted ever again. (Which brings me to an important question: who is feeding the turtles now that we’re all gone?)
As we move into longer-term realities, quality of learning comes into play as well. Personally, I don’t feel like I learned anything—not one single thing—in the last few weeks of the winter term. As much as it was the instructor’s job to come up with an alternative method of delivering material, I see now that it was my job to figure out how I was going to properly absorb the material. Improper absorption results in memorization—not learning—to pass an exam. More work is required when there’s no in-person lecture, no office hours, and no classmates to get notes off of. It takes effort to do that work, effort that, right now, has to go into wiping down groceries, not touching door handles, and not getting sucked into social media. It’s as if my phone is a drink and I’ve relapsed on booze after seven years. That, too, has been harder, but there are certain situations in which even someone who’s not a former boozehound can’t blame themselves for wanting a stiff drink, or a pint with the head poured just right.
I’ve never felt more alone, both as a student and as a human being, than I do right now. Be kind to yourselves, because it’s tough right now for everyone, and giving up on school—even if it feels like it’s given up on the students, staff, and everyone else at Camosun—is the mark of a mind left idle. And we all know that saying about what the Devil does with an idle mind.
So challenge your brain every day. Read a book in old English; listen to a new genre of music. Camosun will be okay. Try and bring the classroom to you. In the meantime, it will be there waiting.