An unparalleled loss with ample space to grieve.
The final year of university is meant to be many things. Challenging, inspiring, distinctive, but not cut short. We have worked tirelessly for four years, studying hard, growing into the people we hope to be, and doing our absolute best to make the most out of our degrees. But that has now been taken from us, and no one quite knows how to feel.
I want to start by saying that in no way do I intend to diminish the widespread suffering and struggle that people are experiencing globally. The remarkable efforts of our key workers and how arduous this period is for them should not be depreciated. Equally, trying to come to grips with this situation and its challenges is tremendously trying.
As I've sat with the reality, I've become increasingly aware of a sense of grief and the various stages I and many others are passing through. I have moved through an array of emotions every day and can feel the toll it has taken on me. Sadness, anger, shock, acceptance, denial, all in one cyclic motion. Ordinarily, when angry and trying to process something, you sit with that emotion and attempt to place it somewhere, trying to accept it. This time however, there is nowhere to place blame. Everyone is affected and struggling in some way. It feels cruel to lack any sense of regularity when it comes to processing emotions and put them away when there is no rule book or established norm for how to emotionally cope with such an unprecedented time.
When we first received the email stating that campus was shut a week early for easter break, it felt like a set-back but not overwhelming. Then came the email saying campus was shut down and the rest of our degree would be carried out online. Graduation got postponed. Everyone had to go home. Lockdown began and the reality started to seep in.
There have been bouts of anger, bouts of tears and an overpowering sense of instability. Trying to go about your day and maintain a routine feels like a foreign task and waves of emotions hitting you out of nowhere consistently has become the new normal.
Each day feels like a test and not knowing if you will wake up feeling encouraged or enraged is a game I did not sign up to play. I am acutely aware of the inability to graduate timely, attain our degree via the normal route, have a graduation ball, spend time in our favourite places or carry out our final term of university like everyone else. It is a staggering loss. To know that our final year is entirely altered and taken from us is one of the worst pains I have experienced and attempting to carry on with assignments productively is incomprehensible and stained with permanent dissatisfaction.
The other day we got notified that exams were cancelled and shortly after we then submitted our last ever piece of Spanish course work. That was it, Spanish over. Assignments for other classes are lined up but that was it for Spanish. This was the most anticlimactic end to my Spanish degree and I cannot quite believe or understand it. Four years of grammar classes, speaking classes, writing classes a year abroad and then bam. Finished. I would give anything to be out celebrating this work with my course-mates and processing this complex emotion of finishing the Spanish side of our degree. Inexplicable pain.
This time will forever be something our year and final year students around the globe will live with and contemplate as we wait to navigate our way through such a peculiar and dystopian epoch. Whilst these things might seem trivial to some, the feeling of loss for finishing our degree in the realm of regularity at university is all-consuming. This past month has been an emotional rollercoaster. There are good days and I am of course consistently grateful for the education I have received, the skills I have learned and being gifted with some of the most inspirational and nurturing professors a person could ever ask for. There are still years of university experience to treasure and love, but the heartache of lacking closure and celebration of this era is something our degrees will be tainted with indefinitely and this is a time to figure out how to manage such a change.
