"It’s crazy to think we haven’t met yet!” A professor exclaimed to my freshman block of fourteen writers during our last synchronous class, our cameras off. Just the week before I had heard the same sentiment from another person I met online as we theorized about our eyesight and how much it had probably worsened in the past year. Just a few months prior I had said the same thing to a different friend I made online as we talked late into the night. It is. It is crazy to think that we haven’t met yet, I agreed in my head. Thoughts following this sentiment came rushing into my head all at once - what classifies having “met” a person at all nowadays? In these trying times, as they say. What classifies the friend label nowadays, knowing full well that most of us haven’t been outside in over a year; are intimate conversations exchanged behind a screen less intimate or truthful because of the fact? Are we not friends yet, after all the earnest expressions of comfort through text?
Isn’t it absolutely insane to think that we haven’t met yet? That time and fate have brought us here, behind the same screen seated in the same place for over a year. From an online high school graduation, an online orientation seminar, to online classes, meetings, and extracurricular work — my freshman year was held entirely online. All these life-changing moments and encounters took place in the same World Wide Web as everyone else, and we will never be the same.
When President Duterte first declared a lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I was at home. It was a Monday, and classes had been suspended a few days before. I didn’t know what to feel about it or what to expect, just like everyone else, but I was relieved to have gotten a few days off after quite a hectic week before. Since that day, March 16th, I often would find myself looking back at “the last good day” (a label I gave to the last day I ever saw my high school batchmates). I remember the itch I felt to go home as soon as possible, anxiously waiting for the clock to reach 3PM so I could catch a ride home before the infamous rush hour came around. It was a slow day, that last one, but I remember my best friend and I’s relief when one of our instructors announced he’d move a quiz scheduled for that afternoon to the next week. A quiz we never studied for, a quiz we ended up never taking. For a while, it felt like time stopped when the nationwide restrictions were finally set in stone, but at the same time, it felt as if there was something to be excited for, despite the pause. Only months later did we realize that it was less of a pause and more of an abrupt halt before we were rushed back into movement again.
After one underwhelming high school graduation ceremony on Facebook Live and one Freshman Orientation Seminar later, our online freshman year finally began. Finally, we were here. For some of us (myself included), it was a dream come true to even be considered a student in the universities we chose. When I was about 10, I remember often wondering where I would end up for college. What would my life look like? Would I have good friends? Would I choose the right school? Would I be happy? Never in a million years would my 10-year-old self have even considered a pandemic - I don’t think I even knew what it was when I was ten. I could have dreamt up the craziest things, like going to a different school, having no friends, or failing all my classes. But never did it come to mind that when the time did finally come for me to enter college for the first time, it would be while millions of people across the world were sick and dying.
What was I to do if not to keep going? To try my hardest to keep up with the time. Even after enforced solitude and quarantine forcefully exposed societal systems and norms to be faulty and wrong, time was going to keep going; and if like me, you didn’t exactly have the privilege to stop and wait, you were to keep going, too. Lost time is hard to make up for, I convinced myself. Often it was incredibly heavy - physically, mentally, emotionally, soulfully. The physical boundaries between my academics, extracurriculars, and personal life were gone. It was up to me now, and hastily please, to now establish my own. While I knew I was going to be going through this tragic situation with other people simultaneously, I was also going to be going through this completely alone (and most days, it really felt like the latter).
What was I to do if not to keep going? So I kept going. We kept going. There were times when the happy moments or milestones would last even until I switched off my laptop and unplugged for the other day, but there were also times when the happiness would last for just that moment before it was replaced by the grief, the anger at a government so cruel and selfish, the uncertainty, the not knowing when this was ever going to end.
Once, a couple of my classmates and I stayed behind after the last class of a certain Literature class to ask questions on our final requirements; this overtime ended with my professor and I in tears. “I am trying so hard and I hope you feel that,” she told us. “I just feel so bad that your first year is online. You deserve so much more,” she said, holding in tears in an attempt to keep it professional. And so we cried, too, because most days it felt like we were alone. Most days it was hard to see how much other people cared. Most days it was unclear to see if anything we were doing was really worth it.
As the year went on, I found that the safest and best thing to hold onto for dear life was gratitude. What, dear universe, is there to be thankful for? On most days, it was easy to name the three things I was grateful for. Some days, it felt like the world’s greatest feat to come up with something. But there was always something, and that is definitely something I credit my survival to - gratitude practice. Knowing that I am here, I am present. Knowing that we are here, we are present. Knowing that I’m not just talking to a robot in these discussion boards, that these are actual people with actual thoughts, too. Knowing that someday I will be able to bring up a comment they made to let them know how grateful I was to read it, even miles away.
As much as I am a sucker for sappy sentiments and romance, I cannot, for the life of me, romanticize the year we just went through. It was incredibly difficult, often I wondered if I would ever be able to fulfill my social battery ever again (I still do). Nobody asked for this, no good person would wish this on their worst enemy. But even after everything, all things considered, I move - I live - knowing that we made it through. That we kept going. I move knowing that someday, in this same lifetime, it will be absolutely insane to think that we ever had to go through that.
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