The COVID-19 pandemic has changed many of my plans and introduced a new atmosphere of uncertainty into my daily life, which has made it necessary to reevaluate my expectations of myself.

I am a sophomore at Stanford University, and I spent much of my winter quarter this year securing an internship abroad in France, where I was looking forward to improving my language skills through immersion. Now, isolated at home in Kentucky with my monolingual family, I have to get creative in order to find ways to continue practicing and progressing in my foreign language. I read books, watch films, call with Francophone friends for a couple hours a week. This all helps me learn, but none of it will ever match the benefits of a truly immersive experience.

Concert going has always been an essential part of my life, one of the ways I routinely rejuvenate myself, and now these sublime collective experiences are some of the last things we’ll be able to do again–gathering in huge crowds and standing close together. This year at Stanford, I was thrilled to be a Producer for Stanford Concert Network, an organization that organizes free on-campus concerts for students. In the blink of an eye, the 10 events we had already planned for spring quarter, usually the most beautiful and relaxing time to be on campus, were all cancelled when classes were moved online.

I participate in several martial arts clubs at Stanford, and this year we trained hard all fall and winter for a spring competition that will never come now. Though it’s sad to not perform, what I miss most is the dinners and the game nights my team had together after practice each Friday, which always helped me unwind from the stress of the week. I do Tai Chi alone in a field outside my house now, but it is hard to find the same motivation without my teammates surrounding me, helping me improve my form, encouraging me to keep trying moves until I get them right.

But despite these things I have lost, which are just specific examples of the kinds of experiences we all have lost, I try to focus on the upshots of quarantine–the way it has allowed me to slow my life down, to be with my family again, and to reflect on what matters to me most. I’m fortunate to live in a quiet home environment, close to outdoor spaces, filled with many of the books I’ve accumulated over the years. Rather than commencing an entire spring quarter of online instruction, which I find not very conducive to discussion-based humanities study, I decided to take a leave of absence. I’m trying to get some distance from the typical rhythms of school, to read more, to write more, to think more deeply and independently, but also to catch up on all the great TV I never give myself time to watch, to not be busy all the time. I think one temptation in a time like this is to expect yourself to do all those things that you never had the time to do before. But I think rather than piling new projects on ourselves and holding ourselves accountable to the same overblown standards of productivity we ordinarily do, we have to accept that this pandemic has shifted every aspect of our lives. Within this network of changes, of course working and studying does not feel that same, and cannot be done the same way it has been. We have to develop routines that look different, that take into greater account our health and wellbeing, and we have to be forgiving of ourselves if we are not as “productive” as the world has convinced us we must always be. Perhaps this is not just how we should be living during a pandemic, but how we should always be living as the mortal, vulnerable creatures we are.

When I returned to school at the beginning of this year after winter break, thinking that I would be living and working somewhere else over the summer, I wondered if I would ever spend more than a couple weeks at a time in my childhood home for the rest of my life. Now, due to circumstances I could never have foreseen, it looks like I will be here for many more months. It can be very stressful and stifling at the age of 20, to go from a life of complete freedom, surrounded by other intellectually-vibrant young people to back in your parent’s home. But at the same time, I feel incredibly fortunate that I have this home to be in now, and that my family can navigate through this strange period of our lives together.

[submitted on 4/27/2020]