Written by Kirstein Velasquez

So here she is, drained and battered, with her hand cramping at the unusual grip she has on her smartphone, now on her nth Tiktok video about God-knows-what. 3:00 AM. The neon light of her bedside clock glares at her, mocks her for all the decisions that led her here, on her bed, drained and battered with her cramped right hand.

You see, two years into the pandemic, she still struggles in accepting the truth now laid in front of her. A frustrated STEM student now lost in a communication degree program, playing around with words that seem right, phrases that seem smart just to pretend she belongs here. She’s just a wooden boat thrown in the middle of the raging sea. But the most painful realization comes with the fact that she could not blame anyone else because she herself paddled her way into the eye of the storm.

And she carries with her, her laptop which serves to be her sole companion in this lonesome, anxiety-ridden journey. Virtual conversations with her classmates and professors still don’t feel like interactions with real people to her. It doesn’t feel real. She’s just surviving, day by day, filtering through information on how to grow up because the pandemic has stolen the life she wants to live for herself. 

At this point in reading, you might feel disoriented. The sentences are chopped up or weirdly structured as if they’ve lost their meaning long before they were typed into existence. It is as if she, the author, is just putting them into writing with no goal in sight. 

Perhaps this is how the author lives her life now, trapped in an indeterminate time of the pandemic. She, who celebrated her 18th birthday the same day the COVID-19 was officially announced as a pandemic whilst competing in a writing competition miles away from home, welcomed her adulthood literally with a bang. But it wasn’t the “bang” anyone could ever wish for, was it?

With too many breakdowns and existential crises, paired with multiple rejections and academic successes and failures, she celebrated as much as she grieved. It’s like she was living in Schrodinger’s box, in which she simultaneously felt alive and dead with the burden this way of living put on her shoulders. 

In the last months of 2021, she saw a little bit of hope that things would go back to normal. Hopefully, she would welcome her 20th birthday free from the deadly threat of the virus. But then the new variant came and wreaked havoc on the peace the country slowly experiencing. With just a blink of an eye, the prospect of celebrating the turn of the decade of her life disintegrated.

As disappointing as this circumstance is, it gave her another chance in fixing her life before, literally, going out of the comfort of her bedroom which was her safe place in the past two years. This time, she would not commit the same mistakes of wasting her day on her bed, feeling drained and battered, with her eyes dried and blurry from watching her nth Tiktok of the day. Simply, going by the famous Internet statement, she is going to get her sh*t together.

Perhaps this is the change she is headed towards. This is the north star that will be guiding her wooden boat into the shore far from the storm. It might take a long time to get safe, she might end up wounded and rugged, her boat might be destroyed and beyond salvation, but she is alive.

She will be welcoming her 20s during a pandemic, that’s for sure. She might feel the urge to go back to her old ways. She might feel the bed luring her to lie on it for days on end. She might be stuck with scrolling through her Tiktok FYP. But she will resist it, she must as she will not be wasting this chance to change. Now’s the time to make a change and get her sh*t together.  

This essay goes the same for all the people who will welcome their 20th year of life this year. Take every day as your chance to be a better version of yourself than yesterday, and don’t wait for another year to jumpstart your improvement. Because if not now, then when?