We are roughly a year and a half into the Covid-19 pandemic, and with the Delta variant things don’t appear to be calming down anytime soon. While we are “returning to normal” in a sense, life still remains changes. From mask mandates, social distancing, and continued strain on our medical system we continue to feel the effects of the virus. I wouldn’t be surprised if we never truly return to “normal”.

I distinctly remember talking to my roommate at the very beginning of this all, when talks about going online for college were just beginning. I thought that we would only be online for the remainder of the semester, and by the following fall semester all would be well. Oh how wrong I was.

Covid-19 will undoubtedly be an event for the history books, something that we look back on like 9/11. Countless lives lost, increased political turmoil, and a drastic change to daily life. This pandemic hit during what could have been some of the most exciting years of my life, but instead I spent over a year cooped up at home taking online courses. With the potential of returning online I have become desperate to regain some of the experiences that my peers and I was robbed of. Meeting new people, going to the bar with some pals, and even enjoying my time sitting through an in-person lecture. Middle/highschool me would have been disgusted if they heard me say that.

This pandemic has brought out the best and worst in a lot of us. I relapsed back into a depressive state, losing my motivational drive. I have been working during the entirety of this pandemic, so I dealt with a lot of different folks, and a lot of different reactions to the pandemic. Some got mad at us for trying to follow mandates, others got mad at us for not being strict enough, but the best customers were the ones that didn’t complain and lived like nothing had changed.

I hope that we will be able to get through this pandemic, but with a growing amount of variants, social discourse, and deaths it might be quite a while until Covid-19 is in the past.