Dr Kristopher Lovell

9th June 2020

It’s been about two and a half months, I think, since I realized how big an issue this pandemic was. It’s not common for universities to shut down like this – even in terrible winter storms our campuses may remain open. And somehow, near the end of March, I woke up to learn that basically every major university had moved their courses online for the rest of the term; mine followed later that afternoon. Now the term is over and this is how I have graduated – online without ceremony in the middle of a global pandemic. I don’t know how I feel about anything right now. I feel like I am overreacting in one moment to not taking things seriously enough in the next. Now somehow we are in June. I keep forgetting about the pandemic now; I’m nervous about going outside at all, even though I still miss just being able to sit in a coffee shop or go get bubble tea with friends or exist in a library, but with the recent protests it’s so easy to forget that both these things are happening at once? I don’t know why. I know that doesn’t really make sense, and that major events can obviously happen concurrently, but reading or learning about this in regards to history is so different than actually living it.

I’ve stopped reading the news as much. Normally I’d like to keep track of what’s happening locally and elsewhere, but these days, I’m just too tired. I was already burned out from school, and now I’m sure I still am, but now I just feel… More unmotivated and apathetic? Lazy? I really don’t know how I feel other than just weird; it’s like I don’t have enough space in my brain to deal with everything that’s happening at once. It also feels a bit weird how I keep wondering what things will be like later. Once we get past this how will things have changed? Will things have changed? Whether they find a vaccine that works or whether we all have to learn to live with this somehow, what’s going to be different and how? I also find it weird, and therefore difficult to say to others, that I want to remember this? In that, I don’t want to forget how surreal and bizarre and deadly serious all of this is; I don’t want to look back one day (because I’m really hoping to survive this) and think, ‘Oh, it wasn’t that bad, people just overreacted,’ because it is that bad and people are not overreacting.

For now though, I’m just going to keep looking for a job and trying to figure out what, if any, career goals I have.