This Thanksgiving, I sat around my family’s dinner table to reflect on how we got here. In reality, I don’t think anyone knows. One day I’m having the time of my life, living in Spain, traveling the world, meeting friends with unrecognizable accents, and learning about myself, my potential, and my independence. Then, all of a sudden, the coronavirus isn’t “just the flu” anymore and I’m on a 17-hour trip back to Rochester to quarantine without my family for two weeks. So nine months later, how did we get here? How did our “2020 vision” make us blind and afraid of new experiences, seeing our friends and family, and suffocating in 100% cotton face masks? These unanswered questions have left the world feeling helpless and longing for a reason to start over in 2021. But this Thanksgiving, I sat at the dinner table and I took a step back from our new reality, and realized how far we have come as a society. We have accomplished so much. This year has not been easy and we deserve credit for all of our hard work. We have survived! This may be the annoyingly positive mindset speaking, but hear me out about what I know that I’ve accomplished this year and that you might have too!
For starters, did anyone else know what the word “pandemic” meant before March? I woke up to a call at 3 a.m. after President Donald Trump had set the travel ban back home in the United States, and my friend asked me, “They declared a global pandemic, do you think we’ll be sent home?”, and all my bed-head brain could think about was, “What’s a pandemic? Why would that send us home?”. Surely enough, I learned what a pandemic was pretty quickly, and I won’t be forgetting that exhilarating definition anytime soon.
I think we’ve all experienced some kind of move this year. It’s like the world said, “Hey, do you think you’re an independent and mature individual? No? Here, try this.” and we get tossed around to deal with the punches as we figure out how to get home, where is home, where can I quarantine safely, can I really pack up all my things and leave in an hour? The answer is YES! Whether it’s moving from your dorm to your childhood home, moving back to your home country, or just moving your bedroom to the basement, we have learned to adapt and that is not easy. When Spain went into lockdown, my host dad gave me one hour to pack my life into two suitcases. We went to their guest home in a small town away from the city center where COVID-19 was spreading. From there, I was sent home with those same suitcases I packed in one hour – and let me tell you, they were not packed neatly whatsoever, but that was a problem for later.
One of the most iconic lessons that my quarantine roomies and I learned back in March was how to grocery shop for four people to last a month at a time. Grocery shopping was an occasion for us. We got to get dressed, try on our freshly sewn masks, and take a car ride to Walmart! Yes, Walmart was the highlight of our month. We walked in excited and hungry, and we left prepared for an apocalypse (which is debatable what we’ve been living through). My roommate learned to make the best lasagna; it was a quarantine-locker favorite for the entirety of our three-month lease. We all have at least one new recipe from this year too!
Once the state slowly started opening up again, I got called back to work. I went from the weekly $600 in pandemic unemployment, to relearning how to budget, how to be social with new people again, and how to work in 90-degree weather. This was a challenge for me. While I was ecstatic to be reunited with my coworkers, I had to start earning a living again. Not to mention how weird it was to see everyone, but now with masks on? It was such a memorable feeling of unease and excitement, neither of which lasted too long once I realized how difficult it was to work outside while sweating in my mask and hoping I didn’t get sunburnt. I became accustomed to wearing the face diaper for eight hours straight and left the summer with a wicked farmer’s tan from my uniform.
Let’s talk about summer birthdays. First, you never get to celebrate your birthday in class during elementary school, then you don’t know how to celebrate it for your 21st during a pandemic? Not fair. Fortunately, all the time between elementary school and my 21st was celebrated well, but I really didn’t know how to act by the time Leo-season came around this year. When you study abroad, you always come home and realize who your true friends are, but all of that goes into question when you’re living in a pandemic. I spent my 21st birthday with my three best friends in our apartment living room watching Friends, and I have never fallen asleep with a bigger smile on my face.
Woohoo! Classes can resume! Except all of your classes will be online. Well if I wanted to study foreign languages online, don’t you think I would have already? As you can imagine, I was bummed, but I bought a desk for my bedroom and prayed every morning that my wifi wouldn’t give out during my oral presentations later in the day. And it turns out, I loved online classes. As the semester progressed, I found a rhythm in the convenience of taking classes from wherever I pleased. Work until 4 p.m.? No problem, join zoom from your car ride home. Missing your best friend? They have online classes too, so why not sit next to each other (socially distanced!) with your headphones in and laugh at their attempts of class participation. We’ve all done it! Online classes were a blessing in disguise because they put my time management skills and the obligation to be responsible to the ultimate test. Thanks to the hard work and support from my professors, I would recommend online classes for at least one semester to anyone.
So how do I make being an online club officer sound good on my resume? Three words: Virtual Engagement Organization. Doesn’t that sound better than writing down “French Club President” and hoping employers won’t ask about the technicalities of a pandemic during an interview? Organizing on-campus events this semester was no walk around the park and it is completely worthy of a word-blob invention for your resume. Go ahead and add Virtual Engagement Organization to your top skills because you deserve it – we all do. Shout out to my fellow French Club officers and all of our student leaders for putting in the hard work that our students needed this semester!
Studying abroad teaches you a lot about yourself, but also about the world and how they see you. As a citizen of the United States abroad, I’ve had my fair share of, “Oh, your accent’s not from around here. The United States? Your president-” you name it, I’ve heard it (good and bad). But this election season, we not only asked for change, we asked to make history. No matter your political stance, living through history is fascinating. We’ll be able to tell our grandchildren someday the realities of 2020 that textbooks don’t explain and exactly what we were doing when the first woman of color was elected into office. I was going into work when I got four different calls with the news. These are the days we won’t forget.
On my first day of classes this year, my professor told us that they didn’t think that in-person classes would make it until the end of September. While it was a bumpy road, our semester is over and we only got a couple of slaps on the wrist. We had no temper tantrums and no time-outs that sent us home for the year. We did it! We stuck together as a community dedicated to keeping each other safe, and that’s not something that every college student can say that their school can do.
So now, I’m sitting at the dinner table with turkey on my plate and my dad next to me, and all I can think is how lucky I am. This year, more than one million people have died from a disease that we didn’t even know existed until a year ago. This is not the 2020 vision that we expected, but it’s what we got and it is what we can make of it. I’m looking forward to starting fresh in 2021 with my best friend watching Friends in the living room, knowing what a pandemic is, having a bomb resume, and preparing for my last semester of online classes in a community that cares. Maybe it’s not fresh if it’s all things I’ve done this year, but I would relive our accomplishments of 2020 (just not the bad times). We have a lot to be proud of from surviving this year and we can look forward to a brighter future because of it. So 2021 Walmart trips, here I come!