September has fully arrived. The nights have a certain briskness that wasn’t there a few weeks ago. A certain level of sadness has settled into me upon the realization that the majority of summer is over.
Because summer is the period of time that I get to leave the house the most and interact with people, outside of my doctors and everyday nursing staff. When the cold weather seeps in, in my case, it brings a degree of isolation with it.
And it’s for good reason that this has to happen, because me getting a mild cold is nothing shy of a living nightmare for me as well as everyone around me. I have talked about in previous articles that whenever I go inside somewhere, but especially during the winter months, I wear a mask. However, because of my health issues this year it’s often hit or miss whether I can even tolerate wearing a mask. This greatly affects my ability to go inside anywhere, when a couple of years ago, it was something that I didn’t have to think twice about.
The ironic part is that for the majority of my life, it was the exact opposite.
When I was younger, and in school, the summers were a time of isolation where I would only see my friends, and fall and winter would be the time I would be around my peers the most. If only, briefly, in person in the fall, back in the days when I was in public school. Winter and the majority of the spring were relegated to being online. Because my peers were used to me going to school virtually, this was normal for them, too. Even though I was often too anxious to open my mouth, and would often wait to get the debrief of all the drama from my best friend, it was enough to just exist with other people my age.
The realization that my life was inherently lonely didn’t fully hit me until I was an undergrad.
I didn’t really have an idea why this feeling came to me suddenly then, because I was still very much around people my age daily, albeit virtually. But it felt very different than it did in high school. This was probably due to the fact that, unlike all of my schooling experience thus far, the people that were in my classes were people that I hadn’t grown up with. And I didn’t blame them. Because it was very hard to socialize with other people when I was going to my classes through a classroom aid setting up Zoom and me logging in.
For the longest time I held tight to the belief that I would find my people in college, and it seemed virtually impossible for me to do so.
This prompted me to join clubs, like The Collegian and Amherst Wire. I was a writer, after all, and I had the idea that I could write my way into making friends and maybe into the heart of the latest cute boy’s heart I had my eyes on.
The plan that I had concocted as a 19-year-old was foolproof; it only needed a worldwide pandemic to set it into motion.
And a year-and-a-half later, my plan came to fruition. When my classmates were figuring out Zoom, it was finally a level playing field. I could interact with my classmates in private chats, and for the first time in a long time, I felt like I was finally making friends.
I can genuinely say that I felt like I also became close to my peers at the Amherst Wire during that time frame, primarily because we were pumping out journalistic content during an “unprecedented time.” It was a traumatic period of time that we were all growing up in.
I haven’t spoken to any of them though, in approximately five years.
Grad school at Emerson College was akin to undergrad during Covid-19, because my program was all online. I was able to actually make a group of friends that I still regularly video chat with. Getting to say hi to one of them during the hooding ceremony was one of my favorite memories from my time there.
It’s true that I love school, and always have. But even I have to admit, at the end of grad school, I was experiencing academic burnout. People who know me well enough often ask if I’m going to go back for my doctorate, and finish the academic cycle, once and for all.
I have to be honest, the prospect of entering into a virtual classroom is tempting as a temporary cure to my wintertime depression. Academia has always been easier for me to navigate. But I have to see what I can do in the real world, first, as lonely as it might be during the fall and winter.
Joanna Buoniconti is a freelance writer and book editor. Her work is also featured in the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s Quest magazine and SMA News Today. She is a reader at West Trade Review.