Well, the plan was to write a few sentences every day about my day. But it’s been 11 days and I’m just now sitting in front of my laptop.
Honestly for the first week there really wasn’t much to report. I spent most of the day laying in bed watching two season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine in two days and then I downloaded TikTok, so you can imagine how it went from there.
The first few days of my quarantine, it was so nice outside it felt like spring in Michigan. And then in typical Michigan fashion, it got freezing cold for the next week. It’s supposed to warm up this weekend and I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I went on a few runs in the past days and it turns out that running is a hell of a lot harder when you spend the other 23 hours of the day not moving at all.
My body went from exploring new countries and averaging 9 miles a day walking around to this.
I didn’t really do any homework the first week in quarantine, either. If you’ve never taken online classes, let me just give you the gist of the experience: you have no external motivation to do anything so you push off every assignment until the last minute because even though you have the attitude that you no longer give two s–ts about the class, deep down you’re afraid of failure so at the last minute survival instincts kick in and you do the work anyway. This has been my worst school experience ever, so far. Yes, even worse than high school.
I probably wouldn’t have done half my assignments if it hadn’t been for the fact that I was partnered up or in a group and I’m not the type of person to screw over other people. I don’t need the credits from half these classes so I could care less if I passed those at this point. But I refuse to screw other people over, so here we are.
I think the reason I didn’t have the courage to write the first week of quarantine was because I wasn’t ready to look myself in the mirror and really accept what I was doing: distracting myself by consuming social media and stupid videos on TikTok and hours of Netflix so I didn’t have to think about how I felt.
So I didn’t have to think about how I was dealing with the trainwreck that is now my life. So I didn’t have to acknowledge the moments of sadness I felt whenever I thought about my grandpa. So I didn’t have to think about the fact that my current location is Michigan and not Utrecht. That I was spending all my time alone instead of with my friends in the Netherlands or going to class or traveling to a new country.
It wasn’t until this week, when a couple different people reached out to me and asked me real questions about how I was doing and how I was feeling that I found myself randomly spewing out my feelings when I wasn’t planning to. I realized I had been pretty much been just existing the past week. Going through the motions, making every effort to distract myself from feeling anything because I knew it would be too much.
But as Mrs. Steitz, one of my many second moms, told me, you have to feel all the feels. They don’t go away if you ignore them. You don’t feel better when you do. You’re allowed to feel how you do.
The other thing that was bothering me and that I was avoiding was the fact that I feel so utterly purposeless right now. I didn’t have a reason not to just simply exist and go through the motions. I scrolled through twitter and saw story after story covering the COVID-19 crisis and I barely read any of them because all it did was make me feel sad about not being a part of covering it.
I watched as my school paper, which I used to claim with such pride, posted a couple stories as the crisis unfolded. And I waited for more, wanting to be still proud of what used to be most of my life. And I was a little disappointed, but I can’t really blame them. A lot of the editors lack experience and that’ll come with time.
One of the editors asked me for advice on a story and I happily obliged, and I (still in the Netherlands at the time) updated her on my situation and other students abroad that I had heard about. She told me they were trying to get someone to cover it and no one was motivated to write about anything and that just killed me. Because if I had been Editor-in-Chief…let’s just say things would have been done differently. And that job was something I did not want and turned down the opportunity to take. I still stand by that decision, however it’s still frustrating to see other student newspapers kill it with coverage and be left waiting for my school to report the situation as stood at Ferris and fight for our students.
Back to what I was originally saying, though. It’s not as though I haven’t had an opportunity to write. I did. I pitched a story for the Western Herald because I knew their Editor-in-Chief and I was studying at HU with several WMU students. I had interviews. I had some pictures. And then the day after I started writing it, my grandpa died.
I barely had the motivation to get out of bed than weekend, let alone write. Ever since then, I haven’t been able to finish the story. I don’t know why. It’s a little irrelevant now. But even a week after I got the interviews I could have written it. Every time I sat down to write it, I just didn’t. I don’t know why. I just didn’t want to.
Now, Twitter just stresses me out. I see my peers that I was keeping up with in the fall continue to write stories, some even freelanced for the Detroit Free Press. And I just get this sinking feeling that I’m falling behind. I imagine in my head one day in the near future being in a job interview and being asked ‘So, what kind of coverage did you participate in during the COVID-19 crisis?’ and sitting there with the only answer being ‘nothing because I was mildly depressed and no longer felt a passion for reporting.’ What kind of B.S. answer is that? I don’t know, but I don’t know how to fix this, either.
Spring was supposed to be quiet for sports, at least at my school. All our teams that consistently made it to postseason and everyone was excited to hear about were in the fall or winter. I wasn’t worried about taking a break from reporting for a semester. I had written enough content about Football in the fall to put in my portfolio. And also because I was also going to have some kick ass international stories from the magazine my classmates and I were supposed to put together this semester.
Well, throw that in the garbage. It’s being transitioned to online and I have no idea how our program directors are going to make this anything of value, what with our 14-person class mostly at home across the world and the complete inability to travel. This isn’t a knock on them by any means, it’s just the truth. How are you supposed to salvage a magazine that was supposed to be filled with stories from different cities across Europe? I don’t know, but I guess we’ll see.
So what do I even have to show for the last four months of my life? Pretty much nothing, writing wise. Unless you call my blog anything. And that’s turned into me recording my dumpster fire of thoughts rather than stories of traveling across Europe.
I count my month and a half of memories in Utrecht as some of the best of my life and a complete dream. But that’s all it really is now. I have a few friends (who freakin’ love) I’ll keep in contact with, but not much else to really show for it. And that stresses me out. I have such big expectations and goals for myself that to not be moving towards those at least a little each semester scares the hell out of me.
This was a lot of word vomit and if you’ve made it this far you’re probably worried about me. Don’t be. I’m still holding it together and I’ve only ALMOST had one mental breakdown. I’ll be fine. I’ll find my place again, as will everyone else. But right now it’s hard. And I’m kind of done talking about it anymore so please don’t ask me about it ahahahahaha
thanks for reading
a midwestern girl in a European world 