New normal is slowly starting to feel better
During a random weekend in early March, I decided to go back home for a short visit. Throughout my four years of college, I never did this much — mostly because I never got too homesick and it was hard to justify the fivehour drive from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, to the Chicago suburbs — but between a spring break trip and my plans to move to Columbus right after graduation, I didn’t know when I’d be back home again.
Little did I know that less than two weeks later — well before graduation — I’d be driving back to my parents’ house again, only this time with a car packed with the better part of my college apartment.
The day before was filled with rumors of the governor shutting down interstate travel, hanging out with my friends for what felt like the last time — and lots of tears. No young adult really wants to move back in with their parents after almost four years of college life, but the circumstances made it more devastating than just annoying.
I spent the next two two months finishing my last semester of college on Zoom, playing Scrabble with my parents and acquiring a particular distaste for what seemed to be the new catchphrases of the pandemic.
My most hated of all: “The New Normal.”
How could anything that was happening — businesses shutting down, hospitals running out of beds, being uprooted in the middle of the semester — be considered normal?
In addition to my general anxiety about friends and family catching the virus, I was heartbroken. It felt
selfish to mourn my lost semester when so many people were mourning much worse, but I couldn’t help but feel sad for the friends I had to say goodbye to two months early, the bar crawls that never happened and my lost weeks of sitting in a classroom with some of my favorite professors.
Back in my childhood bedroom, I found myself feeling like I did as a kid — like nothing was in my control.
In mid-may, I graduated in my living room and found that even though the sadness of missing my college friends hadn’t worn off completely, it had settled. Even under normal circumstances, we would have all probably been going our separate ways by this time anyway.
I made plans to move back into my college apartment for my now-remote internship here at The Dispatch. Oxford is still a two-hour drive away from Columbus, but at least it’s in the same time zone.
I had endless questions about how the program would work and some qualms about not moving to Columbus. I feared it wouldn’t be the experience I signed up for, but tried to be grateful. After all, I had watched friends’ postgrad plans get postponed and canceled, and I was truly excited to start something new.
Now about halfway through the program, I love what I’m doing, but I don’t let myself entertain fantasies of what it would be like in another world, sans pandemic — lunches with my coworkers, happy hours with my fellow interns.
Suddenly, this idea of the new normal is one of the things keeping me sane. Every day I try to convince myself that reporting on Columbus from my apartment down in Oxford and conducting all of my interviews over the phone is how this internship was always supposed to go — that this is normal.
And so, every morning, I roll out of bed, open my laptop, put in my earbuds and watch my co-workers’ faces pop up on Google Meet.
And every day, it feels a bit more normal. mfenter@dispatch.com @maya_with_a_y