Some things are expected to be hard right now. Going grocery shopping is hard, listening to the news is hard, being away from our friends is hard. There is some really nice communal grieving of these things, of the normalcy we lost, of the thousands of lives, of the opportunities, of the innocence of this generation. I think we all knew these things would hurt and require a lot of time to heal from, both individually and as a global community. There’s no one who didn’t see this kind of sadness coming, and I think it’s really normal.

Some things, however, have been really difficult in ways I didn’t expect. Keeping up with friends is hard. I thought I would spend every night facetiming with my friends, but now that every day is the same and our shared experiences are getting slimmer, conversations are starting to feel forced and monotonous. I miss catching up about our days with my roommates whenever we happened to cross paths in the living room, not scheduling a facetime across time zones to talk about how miserable we all are. There’s a somber, bittersweet feeling in pretty much every interaction I have with friends nowadays, and every Zoom hangout leaves me yearning for human touch and real eye contact, not feeling any more connected but definitely more distant.

Taking care of myself is harder than usual. At school, I have a bad habit of leaving the gym off of my to-do list when times get busy, but besides that I know that my health, especially sleep, is critical for my success. Here at home, I’m wondering what’s it all for. I should eat healthy so I can have more energy to sit on the couch and watch TV? I should go to bed at a normal hour and sleep 8 hours so that I can wake up and be miserable in the daylight instead? I know that this is going to end and healthy habits now will serve me later, but my fogged brain finds it too ironic to try to focus on eating leafy greens when going to the grocery store could kill me.

School is way harder than I thought it would be. I know I found reasons to complain about my workload and whatever while on campus, but the actual overwhelming feeling of unproductive I feel right now is something I’ve never felt before. I sit down to do homework, cry while looking at a blank google doc, and close my computer. This has been my process for writing a paper worth half my grade in my most important class. What’s worse is that I get to pick the topic for this paper, as long as it pertains to human development. You guys, I LOVE human development. I am constantly analyzing my friends’ relationships with attachment theory or explaining how our current emerging adulthood crisis is breaking new ground in Piaget’s research or advocating for breast feeding to my male friends who are definitely not having a baby anytime soon. I love this stuff! And now, when I get to write a paper on whatever part of it I want, I feel like I’m being asked to choose which of my siblings to sacrifice to save the other. I just feel so utterly paralyzed. Things like PLA blogs scare me the most because these are assignments that people I care about read, and usually way more vulnerable than I ever am in any academic setting (case and point, this blog post). The past few weeks, when I tried to write something to share, I would get overwhelmed and close my computer. If I tried to take about something else, something mundane or interesting that wasn’t the pandemic, I felt inauthentic. When I tried to write about the pandemic, my brain went blank, and words were replaced by hot tears. I simply could not process what has been going on enough to type anything.

So, I thought, I can type about how I can’t type anything. And now this blog exists. I’m not proud of it, I hope none of you wasted your time by reading this far, but I’m finding that when things feel impossible, sometimes it makes me feel a little less hopeless when I can prove that feeling wrong. In other grieving seasons of my life, more things have felt impossible too. At times it has felt impossible to go to school, to make music, to eat, to leave my house, to share myself with others, to feel happy. Each time something has felt that impossible, it makes it ten times sweeter when I can overcome the grief that’s holding me back, but I’ve learned I can’t do that without truly grieving first. So, here’s to grieving the world as I knew it; my stupid sense of security and invincibility; my one year, five year, ten year, and life plans; and each precious soul lost to the virus. Here’s to doing small things that felt impossible, in the hopes that one day whatever normalcy we can return to will be that much sweeter for it.