What Normal No Longer Looks Like

This time last year I was in Berlin. Confident, happy, excited. The world at my fingertips! I felt like I had finally reached it—I had finally gotten to the “me” I wanted to be. I had worked so hard during my first two years of college, just to enjoy my glorious junior year abroad. I bought flights—London for the weekend, Croatia when the weather started warming up, Portugal for spring break. After Berlin, I planned to go back to New York. I wanted to work, volunteer, drive down to the beach every now and then. Then, I’d be a senior, I’d write my thesis, I’d apply to the Peace Corps—nothing would stop me! It seemed that, at least for the next couple of years, my life had a clear and definite plan. Didn’t movies and books always warn us not to try and plan out our futures?

When we were 17, society told us we had to choose a school to go into debt for, that we might have to move away from our families and pursue an education that would apparently lead us to the Dream Job and the Perfect Life. I stuck with the major I chose and played around with study abroad locations, minors, and extracurriculars. I had a few jobs: an internship at a start-up lab, desk receptionist in the welcome center, and even a summer job building hiking trails. Nothing was perfect—I worried about money all the time, NYU frustrated me with its vastness and impersonal communication, and there’s the question everyone starts asking once you become a senior: What will you do after graduation?

This was already a source of stress for a lot of college seniors. Even with the plan of the Peace Corps, what if I didn’t get in? What would I do then? Yet these potential obstacles felt like small hurdles. I’d figure it out—isn’t that what I always did?

When the pandemic hit, when it really became something to be afraid of, I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. I flew home to Colorado and continued to learn German but now it was on my laptop. I applied for jobs at the grocery stores nearby since everything else was closed. All of 2020 seemed to pass by in an anxious, desperate blur. There was summer? What happened? My fall semester was a stupor of Zoom classes and working at a dead burger place.

Now it’s February of my senior year. What comes next? I don’t know. I have to get myself out of bed every day first. I need to take my weekly quizzes and write reading responses while pretending we’re not in the middle of a deadly pandemic. I’m supposed to care about what my professors are telling me through my computer screen while also wondering if the people in my life are going to die. I have to think about what job I want to have and where I want to live after graduation while struggling to pay my rent now.

How do I apply for internships if no one is hiring? How do I compete with thousands of other applicants that are all applying to the same remote jobs? We’re meant to keep on functioning like everything is normal when, in fact, nothing is even close to normal. There is no normal now.

It doesn’t help if you go to a large school, where you’ve always felt a bit like a number. There are counseling services—if you’re willing to wait a couple of weeks for availability. There are career workshops—if you’re interested in marketing or business.

I don’t want to be bitter! No one does. There’s a lot of “Think Positive” and “The bad makes you appreciate the good” that you may see online or hear from friends and family. This isn’t bad advice, but it may be misplaced in times like these. Toxic positivity can be just as harmful as being overly negative—we shouldn’t have to pretend that we’re okay if we’re not. My mom calling me dramatic on the phone has been a running joke my entire life, but when she says it now, it hurts my feelings. I’ve always been able to land jobs I don’t like but do need—the burger place in the fall, a clothing store my freshman year, a pizza place during my high school summers. How do I find one now that I’m actually interested in? This is a question I was already asking, but now it is underlined by anxiety, even fear.

The pandemic doesn’t erase my student debt, and I’ll still have to make my payments. It doesn’t give me a free pass on my rent. We’re expected to accept that this warped sense of normality means all the things we loved to do or wanted to do may be taken away. Yet all of the things we’ve been forced to do while living under a capitalistic society must continue, this time with the back-breaking weight of new stress placed on top—stress about a disease we don’t understand and stress about everything that’s been taken from us. This doesn’t even include the stress of watching your country war with itself over science and basic human compassion. This doesn’t include the over 500,000 people that are now dead in our home because so many of us couldn’t be bothered to take this seriously from the beginning.

It’s the spring of my senior year, a time I looked forward to intensely. I would have it all figured out, and the future would come in smooth and beautiful as I graduated. That’s not quite what’s happening, but I’m doing my best to figure it out. It’s okay to ask for help. Call your mom. Make a therapy appointment. Eat that junk food in bed, but try to remember to do your homework every now and then. I won’t pretend that I’m totally okay and that my life is what I pictured it would be right now. But I’m going to get up every morning and do my best to accept what I can’t change and, if all else fails, have a good cry about it. Everything feels a little harder and takes a little longer, but in the end, it gets done.

I wanted to write this piece as far back as November, and you can see that it’s already March again now. Every time I sat down to write about what my plans were after graduation, I didn’t know what to say. I think that proves my point.

By Kirsten Lootens

NYU Student who spends her time reading, eating ice cream, and dreaming of a better world.