This month marks the second year of pandemic life, and despite mask mandates being lifted, classes returning to in-person and even clubs and bars encouraging dancing — COVID-19 is still present in our lives.
When I was twelve, like many tweens, I had a graphic t-shirt from Bluenotes that read, “Normal is Weird,” and in a haze of my quirky youth, I’ve come to realize that there’s some truth to that old shirt.
The struggles of the last two years have become scars and they’re visible every day around campus. We’re being told to return to normal but we’ve been conditioned to the uncertainty, the unsettling eeriness about what normal is supposed to even mean in the first place.
It can’t help but feel like we’re not in the clear, and adjusting to something that could slip away so easily feels more dangerous than staying in a state of caution.
To me, it doesn’t feel like a ‘return’ to anything but rather a renaissance. It’s a resurgence of the moments I have loved and missed the most: coffee shops and in-person meetings, hugs from an old friend and even the odd greasy Wednesday night at the Pit. But it all feels so temporary.
For many students, what the university is describing as a ‘return to normal’ is actually something completely brand new to them, as they have never experienced regular university life. Beginning your undergrad mid-pandemic is a challenge that almost half of the current UBC population has had to navigate, and now they are adjusting to what the rest of us would perceive as ‘normal.’
Students are finding the social consequences of the pandemic to be overwhelming. Sara Dee, a second-year student said that she “got so used to the online version of school that [now] it doesn’t feel normal to be in person,” and the challenge to transfer Zoom friends to classroom friends was significant. Adjusting to being in a room with lots of students — who you’ve been watching from a little box on your computer turn into living, breathing people — can be unnerving.
“Jumping back from online, I just don't know who to sit with sometimes,” Dee said.
Second-year student Jack Mosher said that the excitement of being back in the classroom is shadowed by other conflicting emotions. “It’s definitely nerve-wracking walking into all of these classes and doing presentations in front of everyone again,” Mosher said. “It was a bit of a strange experience to relearn that.”
For students who deal with anxiety and other mental health issues, it has been quite a leap to leave the comfort of their bedroom, especially for presentation or discussion based classes.
“It’s really not what I expected,” Ripley Twardzick Ching said about attending university in general. “Social life and classes are not necessarily integrated with the campus or what’s happening in school,” she said.
Twardzick Ching stressed how she feels a strong disconnect between her social life and her university life, when she expected them to be one in the same.
It’s hard to define the period of time we’re in right now since it’s one of great transition.
Expectations feel flimsy and nerves linger in the air. All that can be done is remaining optimistic and abandoning the label of ‘normal’ for a feeling that is more fitting, more comfortable and rather than focusing on the things we have lost or left behind in the past two years, embracing that uncertainty.