The floor: By: Julia Brukx
It’s been a really long day. Hours upon hours spent shuffling from bed to desk in order to create some kind of difference between work and rest, only to be done with the day and feel no sense of relief. It’s 4 p.m. and already dark outside, microwaved food is getting old, and the assignments are piling up. The bed stands ready, warm and inviting with pillows and blankets already broken in from a full day of doing homework upon them. But instead, you choose to lie on the floor. The hard, barely carpeted, stomped upon and lovely floor. If you were a student in 2020, you probably felt an increase of stress, due to school, the pandemic, or life in general. Double masks and variants, gubernatorial scandals, a feeling of helplessness: there’s a lot going on, little of it that we can control, and it’s piling on with school and other responsibilities, such as work and family. Arlee Christian, a freshman at the University of Virginia, says, “Everything weighs down on me a lot more than it used to; I have very few outlets for all of my energy and thoughts.” Additionally, in many ways, it feels at times that
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we are expected to live a post-COVID life in a still-COVID world. Jobs still need to be done, deadlines still need to be met and online school is a difficult rhythm to fall into. Christian says, “I am more likely to miss or forget assignments because of the online nature of all my classes. I don’t usually ever want to go to class because everything feels repetitive.” And because the entire freshman class was not able to close out high school normally, being in college still feels strange at times, like we’ve slipped under the radar and somehow ended up at the next chapter before the last one ended. Emerson College freshman Aisling McDermott describes it being, “so hard to get back on track after not being in school for half a year.” When a schedule that would normally consist of darting from building to building with commutes and interactions with other students is replaced by deciding whether it is worth it to move from the bed to the desk for class, moving onto the floor can be the only change during long days indoors. Escapes of early quarantine, like walks around the neighborhood, have been replaced by ice-covered roads and cabin fever; it seems that we’ve even come full circle, moving from romanticizing a life before COVID to missing whipped coffee and Tiger King. McDermott describes
