Dearest seniors, you have been handed a curveball that none of the adults in your life have ever had to deal with. We are mourning with you and we are hurting for you. But we also believe in you. We believe in your passion. We believe in your resilience. We believe in the future that you are able to create with this seemingly impossible blank slate fate has handed you.
It All Started With a Fan
We figured the handful of tasks that we brought home would keep us busy for a little while, something to distract us from the fact that we couldn’t take the family out of the house and all we had was our work, school, and fruitless attempts to keep us busy. We knew it was wishful thinking, but we optimistically believed we would be satisfied.
Not All Introverts Are OK
Yes, social isolation, in theory, has been great for many of us introverts, but we’re not all thriving and some of us can say with all honesty that we are not ok. We’re being given too much time to think, we have too much access to news and we are processing it constantly, and we are struggling to truly be alone.
The Things I Miss
There are many things that I miss as normal has been upended and a new normal is waiting on the other side, but we’ll make it. We are all mourning the loss of something, most of us are mourning the loss of many things. While I struggle to cope with all of the things I miss, I know that this is for the best and someday those things will return, in one way or another. Until then, I will just keep living the best that I can.
Not How I Pictured the Apocalypse
People are being forced to do some deep soul searching when they look at their families, their careers, and their personal lives. As a society, we are being forced to look at the social, economic, and governmental weaknesses that most of us have been willing to overlook because they haven’t appeared to directly affect us until now. As with all disasters, we’ve seen both the best and the worst of humanity, but it’s the best in humanity that is getting us through and keeping us from slipping into the worst case scenario of our fictional nightmares.
Parenting Rules Weren’t Written For Quarantine
We are four people and two dogs trying to do work and school and life while maintaining some kind of semblance of love and affection for each other. It looks different for every family, but we can’t do board games and puzzles every night. We parents need to offer each other a little grace and know that the rules for modified quarantine are going to be different for everyone. What matters is that we maintain our distance so that someday, hopefully sooner than later, we can all be together again.