By Brian Montano

To say that the past couple of years have been something of a whirlwind would be an understatement. In early 2020, when the first big headlines reporting on a virus steadily grew within a city called Wuhan, my peers and I could have never imagined just how far it would go. It was in the middle of March of 2020—just towards the end of the Winter quarter of my sophomore year at DePaul University—when I was heading back into my dorm hall just as I was reading an e-mail informing us that COVID-19 had been declared a pandemic. All students were to be sent off campus after finals week. This was when it all first started feeling real to me; it was the first of many drastic changes for many students across the country and the world. In our last couple of weeks in the dorms, my roommates and I would huddle around and doom-scroll articles, listen to podcasts, discuss conspiracy theories, and by this point discourse about the then-new pandemic had become completely unavoidable.

Suddenly, I found myself moving back home, with the classroom experience has migrated online. I’d been really looking forward to the Spring before then, with so many plans to go out exploring the city with my friends, and really blossom socially after a long, dark Chicago winter. Just weeks earlier, I had been celebrating my leap-day birthday with some of my closest friends, having a great time out and causing a ruckus everywhere we went. Suddenly, we were all couped up and nervous about getting ourselves or our family members sick, even worrying about the possibility of being exposed already due to the late response to the pandemic in this country.

Families were spraying and sanitizing grocery bags at home, coughing or sniffling in public became an immediate cause of distress for everyone around, and masks were quickly shooting up in price and out of stock as their supply was rapidly outpaced by their demand. I realized quickly that Zoom University wasn’t the best place for me to learn, and I personally struggled with taking my assignments seriously at times. I already struggled with concentration and self-motivation, but the new structure of schooling took my bouts of executive dysfunction to a whole other level. It even came to affect my ability to do the things that I genuinely enjoyed. My writing suffered; I could stare at a blank page or computer screen for hours, knowing full well what ideas I wanted to write, but I would find myself paralyzed. I would periodically hear the news of friends, family, and neighbors falling ill, and I spent months being more reclusive than ever, out of both fear and mental exhaustion. Back in January, during an already gloomy Winter, I was one of the relatively few students who were allowed to return to the dorms. Most of the campus was locked down. No visitors were allowed. For the first two weeks of the quarter, all students were quarantined in their rooms. For fourteen days I only left the room two times, both times for less than a couple of hours: once for a COVID test, and another time for a “mental health break” allowed by my school. Besides that, my only in-person interactions during that time were with the women who would deliver meals to our doorsteps twice a day, and even then, the most I’d get to say would be a quick “thank you” as they had already disappeared down the hallway.

As an introvert, one might think that so much alone time would be a blessing. In some ways, maybe it was, but I personally can’t deny the immense toll that the pandemic had on my mental health. My social battery had become even weaker, self-isolation came easier, and finding the drive to pursue my goals became harder. I know that my experience is not a unique one, and these past couple of years have been immensely difficult for countless people. I have friends who took a whole year off from school, and some who still haven’t gone back. Even now, as the pandemic continues in spite of any denial that things are still as bad as they are, it seems as though time is passing like a blur. Just a couple of years ago, our world of contactless delivery and mask mandates would have seemed incredibly foreign. Now, there are designer masks, and people wave around vaccination cards like Willy Wonka’s golden tickets. Everyone’s had to find their own ways to adapt. Suddenly, I find myself having gone from a happy-go-lucky sophomore to now a senior who still has a lot of things to figure out about his future. Where there was once a sense of stability and direction, there now is a sense of apprehension and unpredictability. Life changed quickly for a lot of us, and it’s still far too soon to tell how we’ll come to reflect on this bizarre era in our collective lives, but there’s one thing for certain: we’re all in this together.