Where I am now, I am a mere student. I am a speck clinging to the large turning gears of some even larger university. Collectively, with other specks, I am taking part in an extraordinary experiment that involves mask wearing, social distancing (or so they say) and no shortage of testing. So far the experiment is going well. I did not ask to be part of this experiment, but I know that it is my duty to do my part if I, and everyone involved with the university, are to stay.

Many times I ask myself, “What is my purpose here?” The world that I read about in the news is filled with wildfire smoke, floodrains, and restlessness from civil injustice and politics. But here, I am protected in this shiny bubble of a college campus going about my life. I go to my in-person classes. I try (and fail) to keep up with the economics professor during his lecture about producer theory, and I leave class with my brain feeling like a mush of refried beans. I have deep discussions with the eleven other freshmen in Writing 101 about how the Internet is reprogramming us to become increasingly dependent on it. (Yikes.) But it is so refreshing to feel the presence of other human beings in the same room, though I will only ever be able to imagine what the bottom half of my classmates’ and professors’ faces look like. For my online classes, there are no masks covering anyone’s faces. Isn’t it so bizarre to feel yourself getting to know your classmates better over mind boggling conversations about Marxism and capitalism, but you only “know” them as little talking icons on your computer screen with their voices coming out of your speaker?

Making friends is a whole new process now, a process that has slowed tremendously given the fact that there can be no more than 10 people together at a time. And given that my memory is already so poor, how am I to remember people from just their hair, eyebrows, and eyes? Eating dinner with new people is also time for the “mask reveal”; sometimes my image of what people look like will be so incongruous with their actual appearance and I will get super confused.

How much easier it would be to daydream about how “things could have been.” A real convocation in Cameron Indoor Stadium to mark the beginnings of college. Dining halls without stickers indicating where you can sit and where you can’t, tens of students pulling up chairs to pile around one single table. Late nights at off-campus restaurants and movies and cards in a crowded common room. How can anyone not imagine these scenes that were reality only a year ago, and now they seem like some distant fantasy?

I used to imagine a lot. But imagining is the same as avoidance of reality, and the only way to move forward is gratitude and acceptance. And once I stopped and looked around, finding gratitude and acceptance was not hard to do at all. I am here, in college. It still feels quite unreal. I now can actually do laundry, use a key, and catch bugs without screaming. I am surrounded by, living with, and learning with some pretty amazing people. The food is great. The campus is green and gothic and beautiful, not to mention the sky-high chapel in the heart of it all. 

Yes, the outside world does seem like quite the apocalypse. But there are only so many things I can control. For now I will continue to slowly make friends, join meaningful clubs, try to stay afloat in Economics, and have deep conversations about the Internet with my masked classmates. I guess finding my purpose will come with time.