I Can’t Do This Anymore

It has been Tuesday for four days. Enough!!

Despite knowing that Election Night will likely be Election Week, my body has refused to accept it. Every day, I wake up thinking that it is still Tuesday. I know I’m not alone. But the weird thing is that the loss of defined time feels…familiar.

When things began to shut down in March, a lot of the traditional hallmarks of the year shifted. March bled into April, which morphed into May. I spent my birthday inside alone finishing up my two theses. But the most devastating news for me — as the first person in my family to go to college — was that my graduation ceremony and all its surrounding events were cancelled. I “graduated” on my boyfriend’s patio while plumbers were fixing the building’s pipes. Unlike a lot of my peers who faced unemployment thanks to the worsening recession, I luckily had the backup plan of grad school.

So tell me why grad school feels like an extension of senior year? Perhaps it’s because I never had a break between the two; instead I freelanced and took classes over the summer in order to fill my time. Maybe it’s because I have to write another thesis, when I surely thought two during a pandemic would be enough. Or could it be because without proper closure, I am treating graduate school like the senior year I never got? I don’t know.