By Marriya Schwarz
It’s hard to believe that a little over a year ago, I was walking around grocery stores maskless, hugging friends, and Frenching strangers. (Okay, that one’s not true, but I could’ve if I wanted to (with consent.)) Early March was a time of recklessness—a time I celebrated that Parasite Best Picture Oscars win and boasted proudly that “this was going to be our year.” Sure, I might have heard about the COVID-19 pandemic, but in my safe how-can-we-get-hit-from-a-2019-virus-when-we’re-forever-living-in-pre-or-post-Revolutionary-War-actually-it’s-kind-of-confusing-because-some-parts-of-town-act-like-we’re-set-during-the-war-and-others-act-like-we’re-still-under-British-rule-and-I-wish-someone-could-give-us-just-a-set-year Colonial Williamsburg where I attended undergraduate education at William & Mary, it didn’t seem like that big of a deal. Sure, we didn’t have vaccines, but we had dried up leeches in a bottle and moxie. The first time we were really advised to take the pandemic seriously was when we were told to not leave the country for Spring Break. But other than that, we ran off of pure blind hope that there weren’t outbreaks in Virginia yet, and thus the disease wouldn’t be able to break the ranks of Civil War battlefields, Revolutionary War battlefields, and more Civil War battlefields. There was this feeling that if everyone could just do their part, we wouldn’t have to deal with the virus—like I know Virginia’s for lovers, but come on… there’s a time and place.
And yet, on March 7, 2020, we had our first confirmed Virginia case while we were on mid-Spring Break from school. And just like that, that last little bit of my Ben & Jerry’s ice cream would sit waiting and alone on the right side of my dorm room freezer for the next four months as they canceled the remainder of in-person classes for the semester. Chaos quickly enveloped the country. The stores were all sold out of toilet paper, bleach, and beef jerky for some reason. Students studying abroad were trying to find impromptu ways back home. And not unaware of my own privilege of being in my childhood home with a full bag of laundry and most of my textbooks, I was penning a frantic email to my school’s library, asking “This is the craziest question to ask on the brink of a pandemic, but is there any news on how the school closing for the coronavirus will affect library books?” (No matter what kind of dystopian apocalyptic situation, it’s nice to know I don’t lose my fear of authority and library fees.) But in my own dorm room, my yoga mat stayed rolled up under my bed, clothes stood by on their designated hangers, and shoes sat biding their time in a disorganized heap. And above all else, those nonchalant “see you later”s to friends stretched into unspoken goodbyes.
Even when we were in school, I was already terrified about what would come next and how we would all be going our own separate ways. My roommate was already knee-deep in job applications and acceptances, which I was happy about, but it only meant that it would take her farther and farther away from me and our little life in a dorm room with a broken A/C unit and walls lined with posters I had forged out of markers and sheer dismissal of copyright laws. I had developed a habit for going up a floor to my best friend’s room after bad days, dressed in a Snuggie, just so she could hug me and I could vent. Sitting on her ottoman and watching her hand-make a birthday card with my colored pencils, I thought about how things would never be this way again.
“We need to have more game nights and more movie nights,” she said. We needed to make the most of it, she meant.
Even today, there are friends I haven’t seen or even really talked to since 2020. The relationships that already had a strong texting relationship—the friends who were studying abroad at the time, the roommate I regularly texted frustrations to, the friends who had already graduated and escaped the dirt roads and horse poop of Colonial Williamsburg, etc.—all survived. But there was just no way to translate those Sadler dinners of eating chicken a little too pink in the center and bonding over food poisoning. There’s only so many times a person can text a friend out of the blue, “Hey, remember how we didn’t trust the dining hall sushi? I think that was a good call” before it becomes outdated. Everyone has new lives, and nostalgia only gets me so far.
And there’s a lot of regret there: It’s hard to know what I would have done if I had known it was my last week at William & Mary. Maybe I would’ve actually auditioned for the stand-up comedy show. Maybe I would’ve hugged my friend goodbye when she left to meet her mom in the parking lot. Maybe I would’ve told my roommate what an honor it’s been to share a room with her for the last three years, and I’m sorry I talk so much during our viewings of Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure, and no, I’ll clean the shower. Maybe I would’ve memorized every colonial brick and every smeared window, knowing I would be stuck looking at the inside of my professors’ homes for the next few months. Maybe I would’ve tried the dining hall sushi. (Scratch that last one.)
But I hear there’s always something weird about graduating: I mean, for the first time in 22 years, your life isn’t structured by what grade you’re in. Some people find the freedom of being outside the classroom liberating and some find it debilitating. And I just happened to fall into the latter category. The future possibilities left me dizzy and terrified, while I felt as though everyone else had a plan and were adapting it virtually. Really, I had spent four years majoring in American Studies and hoping to figure out what the heck it was, and suddenly I had a degree in it, and I still don’t know. And I started wondering if maybe I was only really good at school, and there was no place for me in the real world. (Except for the select few jobs a high school career test had chosen for me based on my personality: A farmer, a mortician/funeral director, and a nun. That’s right, INFJ friends, we’re dying alone.) Then, there was the added pressure of graduating during a pandemic, which was less like graduating but more that I just stopped going to classes. There was no closure to it, and instead of having organized time slots in my day where I talked about book history and read about the Beatles, I replaced it with hours of competing to watch as many Blacklist episodes as I could in one sitting—either no one told me that no one else was competing or I just didn’t care. And just like I was when I was finishing my degree virtually, I was trapped in my childhood bedroom filled with Cat in the Hat puppets and a self-made poster of Aslan from Narnia that I’m pretty sure is just made from cut-out Google images of generic lions.
I had always heard the stories of your college years being your best years, and I started fearing that maybe they were all true (even though I had never even gotten proper drunk once in undergrad.) And mostly, I looked at all of the cool things my friends were doing, and I just felt so out of sync. So, although I had put it off on every summer vacation, every Spring Break, and every free moment prior, I decided to deep clean my childhood bedroom as a way to do something, anything, that wasn’t revising my resume or putting together half-hearted cover letters.
And in the span of one week, I got to see my whole past come to life in front of me in the forms of my Limited Too charm bracelet, four whole High School Musical board games, a whole box full of Aeropostale-branded shirts I shoved under my bed instead of giving away years ago, and other blasts from the past. One particularly odd find was my old Barbie diary where I tracked what little thoughts I had. For the first few pages, I don’t think I understood what a diary was and I just scribbled ink blot-esque shapes on the pink stationary page. But once I got the gist of it, I wrote little historic milestones like “I had my first cut in 2004, April 27” and “I had my first splinter in 2004.” (2004 was a big year for first-aid kits.) But then I stumbled upon this one little passage: “On May 7th we had are [sic] show, we did Cha Cha Slide and This Little Lite [sic] of Mine and the Music Bus and the Bird. I Have a Tuff [sic] Life."
And it reminded me of my favorite piece of advice I ever personally received from one of my heroes, Amanda Stern. She once told me: “The shower is a great place for panic attacks, and the future is the perfect thing to panic over. That said, there was a time when you were panicked over being the age you are right now. There was a time you were panicked over being in high school, and middle school, and those things came and went, and you got through it and now you’re here.”
But the thing is she’s exactly right. There were times when I worried about where I would go to college, whether I would get asked to go to the prom, and even times when I dreaded the “Cha Cha Slide.” And I’m still here after all of that. It’s taking a long time, but I’m slowly learning how to find strength in my own history and the things I’ve gotten through. Our past suffering isn’t proof that everything sucks all the time, but it’s proof of all the things we’ve endured through. Don’t get me wrong: I still miss my friends every single day, I still don’t know what I’m doing with my life, and I still have absolutely no idea what an American Studies major does (but I don’t think it’s watching as many Max Fosh YouTube videos as I do.) But I’m making a pact with myself to stop looking at uncertainty as failure. As my therapist explained to me, the only sure way that things will never change is if I never try to grow. And maybe that’s the big secret: No one really has anything figured out completely. You just gotta put your best foot forward… and cha cha real smooth.
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