RONA (2nd year)

"Similar to many others, the past few months have been very stressful for me. The thought of finals, coming back to university, having to go back home to the other part of the world, and giving up my house here to meet up with my partner back in New Zealand really added a lot of stress. I was very conflicted when I had to take these decisions. I’m someone who likes to have a plan B, in case plan A doesn’t work out, but right now I don’t even know what my options are. I don’t know what is going to happen in the next few months, and having to take these important decisions right now really does not help to deal with stress. I’m someone who overthinks and stresses about small stuff, and this has just been adding up. While I’m doing all of this, I’m also trying to adjust to this ‘new normal’ everyone is talking about. Everyone seems to be looking for a new way to cope with it and some can handle it easier than others. I like to go out and about, visit my friends and stand in a crowd dancing at a festival, so for me, it has been particularly hard. But I have friends that are happy to spend their day at home with me, their family or roommates. Yet, the thing that helped me give structure to my day and take out the stress is going to the gym and exercise. It’s my own way of freeing my thoughts and seeing other people not behind the screen of a laptop. I’ve learned a lot of things during quarantine: I’ve always been someone lost in her own thoughts, but I started to notice that I texted other people more and more just to ask how their day was. I’ve never been someone who likes to hang out with lots of people at the same time, and I’ve always preferred doing my things in my own time, but during quarantine, I started to value group work more, for example with my committee in BASIS. I started to appreciate others a lot more. I realized that the point of your day is not to go from point A to B, but is to navigate among people and learn from them. So, in a way, I can say that this is helping me to grow internally and start to understand what the most valuable things are in life."