S.B., 20, a Hardware Sales Associate in Murrieta, CA

The progression from being independent in my third year in university to going back to my hometown was such a drastic change that I can’t say that I enjoyed at all. One day I was looking for internships and regretting signing up for an 8 AM lecture, and the next I was getting woken up by my dogs barking and looking for “just a summer job”. It all felt like it happened in an instant. It also felt like it was going to be a few months tops. Not a year and a half with no end in sight. I feel like I’m living in a dystopian future like the ones I would read about when I was a kid.

At the beginning of the COVID outbreak, I was working in a campus dining hall and I remember people starting to bring it up in conversation but I kept thinking that it would never happen. It sounded so surreal at the time. Even the concept of wearing a mask outside of the house sounded like too alien a concept. At first, we just wiped down the tables more frequently and set up hand sanitizer stations. Then everything fell apart when I was told that I would have to leave the school. I would have to leave my friends, my apartment, my favorite spots on campus, and my job. I loved being independent and being able to be in charge of my own life. Now I had to go back to a small town that I no longer had any connection to and live with a family that supported me, but didn’t appreciate my independence in the slightest.

Now I spend my time working part-time at the local hardware store, getting yelled at by people for wearing a mask and for not having the products that they want in stock, because I am obviously in charge of that. This experience has also really opened my eyes to how big corporations run as I work in a chain hardware store. Things such as cleaning every day and taking the necessary precautions to keep people safe were just facades so that they could make a ridiculous amount of money while putting people like me and my elderly coworkers at risk. I remember days where we had thousands of people coming into the store when we were being told to keep at home with the members of your household. The hundreds of bags of mulch that I was loading per day so that people could keep their gardens looking nice made me feel like I was the only one in this town who cared that people were dying. I’ve learned that not everyone has the obligation to be nice to you, even if you are hand-loading two hundred bricks into the back of their Toyota Sienna.

I also spend my time as a student online which I’m not a fan of. I am the type of person who needs to be in the classroom, interacting with my peers and professors. Having a Zoom call with the people that I used to see every single day just really wasn’t the same. I remember days of staying up all night doing homework on my friends couch and drinking copious amounts of energy drinks. Now I’m doing the same thing, but alone in my childhood bedroom, which hasn’t changed at all. It’s also so much easier to not go to class than it is to go to the class. Especially now because I feel like I have no true obligation to go besides furthering my education which is hard to be excited for these days.

I’m starting to realize that I’m getting to the end of my undergrad career and I just don’t have what it takes to get into grad school. This past year has really taken a toll on me and I just don’t know how to recover from it. How I’m going to find an internship this late, how I’m going to find professors who I’ve talked to enough to write me a letter of recommendation, and how I’m going to find a job if I have no idea what I want to do. Now, all of my time has been spent waiting for something to change because I feel powerless against the situation. Everyday it feels like it’s getting worse. More people dying, less hospital space. And then there’s the constant fear in the back of my head, when will it be someone who I care about who gets COVID.    

This past year has been really hard for me emotionally but I have learned how to keep myself busy and how to keep my emotions more regulated. I am so ready to not be stuck in this town. I am so excited to move back to school and start living my life again. But unfortunately it’s not up to me. It’s up to people like the one’s in my hometown. The one’s who refuse to believe that it’s real, refuse to read a reliable news source, refuse to care about anyone but themselves. It’s also up to the government and big corporations to let us get back to the way things used to be. I know it’s possible, other countries have already completely eradicated it and are now having concerts and festivals. Not that I’ve ever really been a fan of concerts and festivals, but I would like to have the option to not go now. There is no end in sight, but there could be.

[submitted on 2/16/2021]

Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic is an initiative sponsored by the Poetic Media Lab and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University.

Our Sponsors and Partners

Find Us!

Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA),
Stanford University

Address:
4th floor, Wallenberg Hall (bldg. 160)
450 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Stanford Mail Code: 2055