When the world fell into a pandemic, I was a week away from going to Europe for the first time in my life and two weeks away from studying abroad in New York City for my spring quarter. Leading up to the global shutdown, I was hopeful, excited, and grateful about how far I had gotten throughout my undergraduate career. In a matter of days, text messages, and emails, I came to realize everything was about to change. Now 6 months of quarantine later and my life is nowhere near how I thought it would be. The anger and frustration brought by a global pandemic has subsided and I have gotten used to the ways in which this is our new normal. I’ve gotten closer to many friends i didn’t expect to and have found myself becoming more and more family oriented. While I was used to always looking for the next location or opportunity that could come my way, this pandemic has given me the space and time to slowdown and really consider what I plan to do with my time and in the future. Working from home, or living at work, however one plans to call it, has been a very monotonous routine and hard one hard to stick to at that. This has inspired me to do deep introspection and really ponder about what type of work I find fulfilling and what type of life I plan to live and lead. When things drastically shift and are taken away from you, whether its friends, work, experiences, income, or the simple pleasure of going out to eat with friends, I realize more and more that I must make a commitment to always spend my time wisely and productively in things that truly matter. I never considered I would be living at home again as I am closeted gay man in a hyper-catholic immigrant household. Life at home is hard yet I believe a lot of good may come out spending more time with my family and trying reconcile my identity and my family’s values. I hope that I may look back at this time and be proud of how I responded to what happened. Whether that is trying to form good habits like reading and journaling or engaging with local family and friends on issues like homophobia or anti-blackness in Latinx culture, I hope that I look back to this unique time and can say I did my best to push myself and my family forward. There’s a lot going on with the world that continues to be compounded by this pandemic. I live in a multi-generational low income household in the zip-code in Dallas with the highest cases of COVID-19. Most of my community is predominantly working-class Latinx and Black folk, and so I am keenly aware of the protests, resentment, and sociopolitical transformation that is undergoing in many communities in the US and the world. While I believe this pandemic to have been preventable, I do believe that transformation that my generation is undergoing (a rethinking of the effects of capitalism, neoliberalism, systemic racism, climate justice, colonization, wealth inequality, global femicide, homophobia, and transphobia) was always to come. I zoom out and think about the time in my life I’m in right now. I’m 21 and in my last year at Stanford University. This is a time in my life I always looked forward to. I was supposed to be an RA on campus and give back to the school and community I formed there. I was supposed to finally be able to go to bars and clubs and take part in all the festivities that come with being 21 in college. Yet here I write to someone I may never meet about how everything is not as it should be. It gets a little hopeless at times, and I would be lying if I said my mental health hasn’t been going through a rollercoaster these past few months. However, I find inspiration and hope in a world that appears to be waking up, much like I have.

[submitted on 9/1/2020]