Quarantined Right into Their Own Nightmare

My mid-day haze is broken by a student who walks briskly walks into the office, her pupils as brown as the curls that rest upon her head and surrounded by rivers of bloodshot veins travelling across the entirety of her eyes. She’s on the phone, in frantic Spanish, then frantic English, then a frantic mix of the two: 

“Mami, no se que voy hacer, I don’t know how I’m going to… yes, voy a preguntar, I will ask now, just wait…” she continues walking into Career Services, and I offer a quick, understanding smile. It’s Cynthia, a good friend of mine I’ve known since my earliest days at SLU, surely talking to her mother back home in New York City. “Mis classes estan moviendo para… yes, yes they’re online now Mami but I don’t how I will prepare for my interview…” 

I was hearing the effects of President Fox’s email manifest themselves in the non-stop shrills of the office telephones; seeing it in the frantic movements of the Career Services staff, their faces stained with a look of worry that surely would remain in the coming days; smelling it in the spilled coffee and the uneaten lunch on the intern desk – two of the many helpless victims of the day’s chaos; in the worried tone of Cynthia and her mother, both their voices blending in with the familiar theme of panic surrounding them.

Dear Laurentian Friends, The COVID-19 virus has continued to spread… 

I couldn’t help but feel as though my waist was strapped tightly to the back of my desk chair, the long list of intern duties resting on the scarlet and brown table in front of me blurring into the bright office space in front of me. There was a phone to pick-up, an appointment to schedule, emails to return, things to do, and yet my mind kept traveling back to that email…

Below are the major decisions that the University has made with additional information that follows… 

Cynthia reaches my desk and abruptly hangs up. I can see the lack of sleep in the unruly nature of her hair, the strained bags under her eyelids, the way her blinks last a half-second longer than usual. She takes a deep sigh, pulls on the white strings of her burgundy zip-up hoodie, and takes a seat across from me. 

“Michael, no se que voy acer con… I mean, listen to what I have to do from…” Cynthia begins to ask me how she’s supposed to prepare for her interview job she’s been trying to get for months. She asks me how she’s supposed to continue her jobs on campus and send money to her struggling household without being able to stay on campus. She asks me how she’s supposed to find time to focus on her work in a small NYC apartment with 9 of her family members: her mother, her grandmother, her sisters, her cousins, all living in a two-bedroom apartment, all of whom have pre-existing conditions that places them at the highest risk of COVID-19, with the first two having health complications that require an all-hands approach with whoever’s at home. Should she pick up a shift at the fast food restaurant she worked at over breaks, will her uncle lose his job, should he quit and stay home, what about paying off her student bill, what about finally getting a chance to move her family somewhere better… 

She stops. 

Cynthia takes a deep breath and begins again: “How, Michael, am I going to get this done?” 

I had seen and felt firsthand the devastating realization of what it meant to be a Senior in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. But it was sitting in the Career Services office that foreshadowed the devastating effects of an impending economic recession, of large scale lay-offs and firings, of rescinded job offers and the collapse of industries, of an entire country, an entire world, coming to a screeching halt in the face of a biological enemy unlike any we have seen before — and how uniquely devastating it was for low-income, first generation students like Cynthia. 

Bill Short, the Director of the Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP), once explained to me what made the students like Cynthia so special: “The cards life has dealt these students makes it nearly impossible for them to focus on academic development, but it also means that they possess a unique problem-solving skill-set that sets them apart.” 

Now, weeks later, the world fully immersed in the events that were foreshadowed within my final day at work in Career Services, Bill’s words show me how those same cards Cynthia was dealt put her directly in the crosshairs of COVID-19, squarely in a position to be hurt more by this crisis than perhaps anyone else. 

And the issues aren’t simply academic or economic, but also continue to wreak havoc on the mental health of individuals who belong to marginalized communities that, culturally, suffer from large-scale stigmatizations on the effect of generational trauma. 

“I had been going to therapy in the counseling center every week for months now,” Rosalina told me, also a senior suffering from many of the same problems Cynthia revealed to me weeks before. Before President Fox’s email, Rosalina was a Psychology-Government major, in the midst of two semester-long research projects and keeping control of her deep-rooted familial traumas with weekly therapy sessions on campus.

“But now,” sighed Rosalina, her voice fighting over the sound of her mother’s and brother’s screams downstairs. “Now it’s not so simple.”  

Rosalina explained to me how the triggers of her life at home made staying on St. Lawrence’s campus, along with access to free and consistent therapy sessions, a necessary escape. She explained the difficulties with explaining her situation to her professors, the emotional struggle involved with the possibility of revealing the most private details of her life to anyone outside of small inner circle.

“Now that I’m at home, with parents who don’t understand how demanding college work is, who don’t understand that I need time to myself to focus on my assignments, who don’t give me the privacy I need to call my therapist or Zoom them or do anything,” Rosalina says. “It essentially means that I’m quarantined right into my own nightmare.”