If someone would have asked me a couple of months ago what my March would look like, my answer would for sure not have included being on house arrest and quarantined from the multitude of germs floating around. I would have assumed I would be finishing out my last couple of months of grad school and cranking through hours to earn my certification eventually, which I am still doing these two things, just differently. Now, my day-to-day routine consists of changing from one pair of pajamas to a different pair of pajamas, a “do not disturb” sign taped on my bedroom door in an attempt to be productive, and attending virtual meetings with my professors as if my bed (that I sloppily made) is a normal backdrop. Instead of seeing real people for speech therapy sessions, I am knocking out the last dozen hours I need on a simulation website because my internship was drastically cut short. When I am not conducting business in my home office/bedroom, I am couch surfing, Netflix binging, napping, and knitting like I am in my retirement years before my career even started. I am going to have a nice afghan to show my kids what the quarantine of 2020 was like, “picture it … it was 2020 and there was no toilet paper to be found.” This is going to be my version of my parent’s blizzard of 1978 story. It is a weird time, especially because I have no concept of time or what day it is. I used to know exactly how many days stood between me and graduation. Now, that does not really matter. The University of Toledo, just like other colleges and universities, has transitioned to online learning and the graduation we all hoped for is no more. I have gotten beyond the disappointment of that because no matter what, it is not going to take away from the degree I have worked for and earned. I have my dream job waiting in the wings, and that is what is keeping the motivation high during all of the uncertainty. The one thing that does make me sad is that our big celebration was taken from us. We will find other ways to make up for it when life resumes outside of the confines, but nothing compares to a stadium full of grads and the stands bursting with proud parents and the pictures for a treasured keepsake. Nothing can make up for our last year of grad school being cut short. Our professors have done everything to make it all work out because the show must go on, but it is not the same. My last day at my internship was not spent seeing kids; rather, it was spent packing things up, wondering if and when things would return to normal, and cleaning profusely. If I used one Clorox wipe, I used ten over the same surface. It was a really weird feeling leaving on a Friday, knowing I would not return the next Monday. There are people in my cohort and professors who I will probably never see again aside from some passive social media interactions. Just because my friends and I are separated by distance now, it has not stopped us from talking every day either by text or Zoom meetings. We did not have the chance to properly celebrate and send each other off into our next chapters, but some of us went and risked eating in a restaurant the Friday before they closed and saw a movie in a full theater before those closed too. Reckless? Maybe, but it was so worth that precious time together. I think the timing of the movie we saw, I Still Believe, was so fitting for the situation we are finding ourselves in. Of course, there are so many uncertainties in the world right now, but faith will prevail through it all. Part of this seems like a bad dream. Unfortunately, this is a hard reality to fathom even if we are all living it. I keep hearing people say, “this is the new normal.” I refuse to accept that this is the new normal. It cannot be. It is simply a new present. Stay Curious, Kayla ©Inquisitive Perspectives 2020
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
July 2019
|