It’s March 2024, and you know that means: it’s been exactly four years since the shelter-in-place order was issued in the Bay Area for the first time in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Looking back on that week, month, year of chaos that followed, I have mixed emotions about it all. About how the trajectory of my life, my family’s lives, and the lives of countless others across the world were irrevocably changed forever, in ways we had yet to even comprehend.
One of these emotions is pride. In a lot of ways, the 2020 pandemic coincided with my unofficial adulthood. Had it not been for the shelter-in-place, I wouldn’t have moved in with my now fiancé's family; I wouldn't have gone to Berkeley; I wouldn’t have been given the chance to start anew and cultivate a life for myself. I’m proud of my scarred, unhappy 20-year-old self for having the courage to take that step.
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As a result of the choices I was forced to make during that time, the positions I was put in because of those circumstances, I was allowed to start becoming the person I wanted to be. While others felt as if their freedom was stripped away as they were forced to mask and social distance, I felt as if my freedom was just being granted.
But after four years, as we start to see the long term effects, it is evident that we are now asking ourselves, at what cost?
Many high school students were deprived of their final years, of rituals like prom and graduation, of social and athletic milestones as they looked forward to a senior season they never got. Those high school seniors were then arriving at college completely unprepared, unsocialized, and in some cases academically deficient as a result of remote learning.
I recently read an advice column about how many college students are disadvantaged socially, and even sexually, due to having to spend their formative high school years social-distancing. They're worried about their lack of romantic and sexual experience going into college, which is a perfectly understandable concern for an incoming college freshman, but something I had never before thought of in the context of COVID-19.
In the same vein, there is something else fundamental that many young adults are struggling with as a result of the pandemic, which we are now seeing the effects of: undeveloped or lack of social skills.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was a big problem for me when I first entered the workforce after spending half of college online. In my first week at lululemon, we were asked daily check-in questions, such as what our toxic trait is and what our preferred way of receiving feedback was. I recall having absolutely no idea how to answer these questions, not recognizing that it was likely due to not having to be around or work with other people for years.
For me, this isn’t just attributed to living in isolation for so long, but also growing up a disabled child, which was another kind of isolation. I couldn’t play sports until high school because of my ostomy bag and feeding tube. I couldn’t go to other kid’s houses or birthday parties because of my fragile health, and I rarely played with kids at school because I was so tired. I had a hard time relating to healthy children, and I now have a hard time relating to healthy adults.
This combined with moving elementary schools twice, being homeschooled for one year of middle school, and attending three different high schools, I have never had a solid friend group in my life. Aside from a few childhood best friends, only one of which I’m still close with, every one of my friends is a fellow ostomate that lives in a different state.
All that being said, you can guess how ecstatic I was to make my third real friend in my graduate program. She and I have all our classes together this semester and were put into a breakout room last week by pure coincidence. I let her know of our identical schedules, and we began talking about our academic background. We discovered that we both went to Diablo Valley College, most likely been in the same Shakespeare seminar, and both had transferred to Berkeley.
“Did we just become best friends?” she asked just as the breakout room ended. In that moment, I felt the happiness and confidence that only an extrovert who was never properly socialized can feel.
After exchanging numbers, it became evident that we are both suffering from a lack of social skills as a result of attending college during a pandemic, and are both having a hard time making friends in graduate school.
This is just one of the many examples of ways in which the world and our lives as we know them have changed in the past four years, whether we’ve been privy to it or not, and many of these realities can be directly correlated to the COVID-19 pandemic.