Obviously the darkness outweighs the light in the situation we have all found ourselves in. I wake up each morning and wrestle with the question “how did we get here?” One day I’m on top of the world, planning my summer in New York City, saving up for my trip to Las Vegas this fall, counting down the days to my 21st birthday, constantly surrounded by my best friends who all lived just steps away. But now, my days are more routine than they’ve been since I graduated high school: with all of my friends now hundreds, thousands of miles away, I wake up, wallow for a bit, scroll through social media, head downstairs to eat breakfast, and then I read for a few hours, do some work for my remote internship for a few hours, and distract myself with video games on my phone to fill the cracks in between. Every day, that’s what I do now. I migrate from my bed, to my couch, and back to my bed to get ready to do it all over again the next day. I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t dreadful, at least compared to how I thought I’d be spending the summer I become legal.

I’ve always hated the phrase “distance makes the heart grow fonder”. In high school, probably 90% of my closest friends lived across state lines. I often think about the fact that the collective amount of time I’ve spent in person with one of my very best friends is less than a month. While distance likely helped make the heart grow fonder in high school, distance is also what caused the fall out of so many of my high school relationships ever since. While my heart absolutely bursts in the presence of my college friends whom I go months without seeing, I am terrified that this heart-strengthening distance will have an expiration date, and while the days until that date tick by, I am spending them amidst a routine that involves almost no one but myself.

All of this in mind, I was recently having a conversation with a friend about how much quarantine has changed us in such a short amount of time. For example, I’ve always loved to read, naturally, as writing has been the truest love of my life. But after having read roughly a novel a week when I would have otherwise been in class full time, I realized that literature is what I love most, and what I know I am supposed to be doing with my life. In the time I spent diligently reading during the months of March, April, and May, I simultaneously came to the decision that I want to get my MFA in creative writing after undergrad.

My mental health took a pretty hard hit as a result of COVID-19, as well as all of the seemingly unrelated tragedies that have occurred in 2020. I have never before longed so deeply to go back in time to before everything, for lack of better phrasing, essentially went to shit. Day after day, it’s like there is always something going wrong. And if a day gets skipped, the next day makes up for it with double the worldwide negativity. I’ve tried new ways of coping, and I’ve found that peace and quiet is an often overlooked, but SO unbelievably crucial coping mechanism. Some people enjoy running, some enjoy writing, some enjoy listening to music, some enjoy making their own music. The one thing that I believe everyone, regardless of their preferred coping strategy, could benefit from, is an attentive period of peace and quiet.

If you’re religious, silent prayer works. If not, meditation does wonders. And if neither of those work for you, yoga is a pretty good alternative. Many people feel uncomfortable with quiet, but that is a curable discomfort. With practice, quiet can become your best friend. Quiet has been my saving grace since mid-March, and without quiet prayer, or quiet meditation, or time spent quietly reading, I would not have grown into my own the way that I believe I have during this dreadful time.

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