It feels like 5 am I was 8 years old, waiting for a snow day, seeing schools close all around us on Fox 4 news channel. Everything in a standstill as I wait in the dark of my living room for my district’s name to pop up on the red chyron announcing closed schools on tv. The pit in my stomach feels the same, but it’s from a fear and anxiousness of the unknown rather than not yet eating breakfast.

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The announcement comes and it’s more drastic than everyone thought. The rest of the semester? This was supposed to be a 2-week ordeal. I imagined this to be a short stay-cation where I could focus purely on school and taking care of myself, a pause from running around campus to endless meetings and commitments. Instead, people are jumping on flights home and tearfully saying their goodbyes. I’m sad and at a loss. But that’s my fault for fantasizing what feels like the beginning of an apocalypse. I judge people clearing out supermarket shelves of toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and Lysol wipes. “Does anyone understand the concept of herd immunity??” I huff to my friends. Tired and resigned thoughts pass through what feels like a reluctant consciousness. Maybe I’m being too harsh, maybe I shouldn’t judge these people for wanting to protect themselves and their families. People are irrational, I’ve learned from my behavioral economics class and also from having common sense. I’d like to think I’m an exception but I’m not. Who am I to judge? Maybe I would feel less distraught about the world if I was a little more ignorant and irrational.

 

I constantly struggle with my personality. I’m a long term thinker. On a practical front, this has always served me well, I make less dumb mistakes than other people my age, I’m always alert to possible consequences. It’s that classic Catholic guilt my parents have built into me. Except I’m not Catholic, and neither is my family, but I always hear that phrase on tv interviews and I like to identify with it even though I have no relation to the religion. My mom used to be a broken record repeating the starving children in Africa stereotypical narrative to me during mealtimes. “If you don’t finish that last chicken nugget, I’ll ship it to a starving kid in Africa” she used to tell me. I would stare blankly into my plastic blues clues plate at that last dinosaur-shaped nugget, unaware of how this mentality would affect me in the future. I take actions that I think will serve a larger purpose, sometimes this makes me question if I’m a snake: is this just me framing “I make moves with an ulterior motive” in a less bitter and acidic way? No, I reassure myself, the consequences I consider are always empathetic to others, I’m an empath, not a snake. I think.

Long term thinking also harms me, however. Sometimes I’m unable to enjoy the present moment, paralyzed by the sinking feeling of what comes after. It also always puts me at the same crossroads. Do I choose the fun thing to do? Or do I choose the thing that would potentially benefit me more in the future? Why can’t those be the same thing? If they aren’t, does this mean I’m on the wrong path?

 

My roommate spontaneously cut her own bangs, I text my friend from work this, it’s like Britney in 2007, he says. We bounce radical hair change ideas off of each other. We are all Britney in 2007. With my constant inner struggle, maybe I’ve always been Britney in 2007.

I’m already packing to go home. I shouldn’t say ‘already’, it’s been two weeks since the sudden pause and it’s a miracle I’ve stayed for this long at my apartment with my Dad texting me to come home every day since. But I guess ‘already’ is valid in the sense that I’m leaving campus life in late March instead of early May. I dread going home for two reasons: 1. I value the independence of living alone and making my own choices without itchy outside commentary, 2. somehow I always turn into the worst version of myself from extended periods of living at home. This is stupid, don’t be ungrateful. Some people don’t have dependable, safe homes to go back to and you’re complaining about not having independence and a Mom who’s naggy because she cares about your health? Don’t be a brat.

Inner whining is always followed by a sharp slap of guilt. The world is so big, there are so many people who have it so much worse than you. People are suffering, dying, and here you are complaining about petty, teenage-ish problems? A lot of people would love to only have petty little problems. 

I know I shouldn’t invalidate my feelings like this. My high school social studies teacher once told me that everyone is allowed to have their own problems, including me. But I can’t help but minimize my own in comparison to the magnitude of greater issues of the world. I can’t help wonder if I’m self-absorbed for complaining about the things I complain about. Where’s the line between being allowed sulk in your own problems and being removed from problems that hurt more than just yourself? Seeing all these multi-millionaire celebrities broadcast the airing of their grievances from their glamorous estates now constantly orbits these themes around me. How can some people boastingly have so much when others have so little? How can I stomach having my own grumbles when they pale in the face of more life-threatening situations?

I’ve read too many opinion pieces, op-eds, think pieces about productivity or lack of it while we are forced to stay home. I can’t distinguish the difference between self-care and laziness anymore. Burrowed under my covers until 2 pm, mindlessly scrolling through Twitter, Instagram, Facebook; scrolling through the surge of online sales companies are hosting to stay afloat. Some say it’s merely a coping mechanism, understandable for these strange, uncertain times. Others dismiss it as exploiting my newfound lack of schedule to slip into good-for-nothing laziness. I do one, maybe two pieces of work for school per day. I drag myself to respond to emails for my job. How dare the world still go on when all I feel is unproductive, I thought things were supposed to be on pause.

 

Sometimes I wish I was a healthcare worker fighting on the frontlines, at least then I would be apart of one of the few moving parts left and wouldn’t be having this inner tug of war of whether I’m doing enough. A small voice tinkles like a bell hanging above a shop door as that thought enters my head again. Is that selfish? Are those selfish reasons for wanting to be a healthcare worker? Are you selfish?

The days blur together into a continuous amalgamation-esque slump of time. The finish line we’re supposed to look forward to is marked farther and farther away. First, it was “stay inside so we can have a fun, normal summer,” now my friend texts me that Stanford has canceled their Fall semester. It’s easier to not feel at this point rather than build sandcastles at the shore of hope only for them to be swept away by waves of bad news into an ocean of uncertainty. 

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For a serial planner like me and also probably anyone else who likes to have an ounce of direction, embracing uncertainty is hard, to say the least. Which is so ironic, considering a lot of life comes down to random chance. I would like to say that through all the uncertainty you can grasp onto your sense of self since this is the lense we’ve been given to view the world from. But even then people grow and change and adopt different values and identities in different stages. Maybe wrestling with myself is the only thing I can do and continue doing.

Lately, I’ve been reading that experts are saying that this might turn into a normal, cyclical virus like the seasonal flu. It seems like a deeply unsatisfying, anticlimactic conclusion to something everyone thought we could just buckle down and stomp out forever in a matter of months. But eventually modern medicine will develop technology to manage it so that it wouldn’t be as elusive and scary as it is now. It would just be the new normal we have to continuously wrestle with.