I’ve lost two years of my 20s to COVID. Here’s what I learned.
When you’re young, it’s easy to think that you’ve missed out on the Last Good Time. The young people before you used up every fun thing, and nothing will ever be new or exciting. It is an affliction of the young, stuck believing we missed the rose-tinted before, and that in some ways the actions of the Last Good Time have resulted in today’s consequences.
I was 22 when the pandemic started; I turn 25 this year. The Last Good Time feels further than ever, and it’s hard to imagine we’re in for any good times soon.
Let’s be clear: I have not had the worst of COVID, not by a long shot. I have had a steady job. I have had a place to live. While my 2019 graduation was hijacked by rain, the UNC-CH students who graduated in 2020 didn’t get a ceremony for more than a year. I haven’t even had COVID in the last two years.
But the typical growing pains of early adulthood have felt more isolating than I anticipated, pre-pandemic. I moved in the pandemic. I switched jobs in the pandemic. I lost my grandmother in the pandemic. And even though we once again feel done with the pandemic, we’ll probably have another surge, another variant, another time when we all have to go back into hiding.
Even mourning what could have been the last few years feels exhausted, because many of us, including myself, could have chosen to keep living with the risks. Lots of people my age never stalled their twenties for the pandemic. I could have gone out to restaurants and bars and concerts and go on dates and trips and live the life I expected to live as a twenty-something.
But for so many of us, this has not been the twenties we expected based on TV shows and social media posts from years past. Being in your twenties right now feels like being given the keys to a car with 200,000 miles on it. It’s exciting to get the car, but the excitement is tamped down by the sheer stress of knowing it could break down at any time.
The pandemic has made a hard adjustment harder, and COVID has changed how we see the world and other people. As a child and even in college, I understood that the systems in place to protect me and other U.S. residents were in some ways untouchable. In the last two years, I’ve had to reckon with the knowledge that every government, every business, every community is deeply human, and therefore deeply flawed and sometimes harmful.
But, every once in a while, we get some good. I see how my friends and neighbors show up for one another. I see glimmers of hope in the texts my best friend sent me when she got into med school, in every graphic and email from activists working to make the Triangle a more equitable place, and in each announcement about a newly unionized workplace or a venue with a full schedule of live music.
In another way, COVID has changed how I see myself. I feel stronger in my convictions and the ways we could make being alive a little bit easier. I’ve spoken with disabled people who benefit from the digitization of work culture. I’ve seen how the pandemic inadvertently led to fewer people being held in jail awaiting trial. I’ve seen people realize, alongside me, that things are not OK, and seen how those realizations can lead to collective action.
I don’t feel like COVID or any part of the last few years “woke me up,” because waking up implies that I was asleep and inculpable before this. I wasn’t: I was awake, but distracted, and distraction in this case is a privilege. I wish my early twenties were different, but I can’t change them. All I can do is remember that there’s going to be a Next Good Time.
This story was originally published March 8, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
