We as a society are fundamentally divided on every single issue, but humanity seems to agree on one thing at this point - the year 2020 was a trainwreck and should never be spoken of with anything other than utter distaste and relief that it's gone.
“This was supposed to be a good year!’”
You know we used to be so proud that we were our high school’s 2020 batch? As middle schoolers going through the phase of finding absurd things fascinating, we prided ourselves on the fact that we were going to be the 2020 batch. Turns out we barely graduated.
Although it feels like a lifetime ago (it probably was, who knows at this point?), my batch wrote our dreaded 12th-grade board exams with usual trepidation of the question paper while relentlessly applying sanitiser every time the question seemed a little tricky. April passed, May passed and the start of June, when we had finished every movie and show we had wanted to catch up the whole of last year and realized that watching Netflix had become a full-time job- lockdown officially became worse. We still had an exam left that eventually got cancelled but we never got closure until the results arrived, because what if it was a trick?
The summer after high school is the one everyone looks forward to. The months after you finish your exams and before you get your results, as you sit on the beach in denial about your lack of plans for the future... Remember the good old days? These plans were of course ruined, and I personally went through a difficult phase for the first time, which was scary, but eventually, it got better.
CBSE announced results in their usual haphazard way on a random Tuesday with no warning and sites crashing, but lady luck granted me a better result than I had ever expected. I felt as though a weight had been lifted off my shoulders as I sent in my college applications confidently. My music playlist slowly seemed to change to happier songs for the first time in months.
The first day of college brought another let-down. I wasn't able to choose the perfect outfit to wear and walk into a new campus for the first time. Of course, a week was all it took to realize that it meant I could lie on my bed as I attended ( read: scrolled through Instagram) my classes, which was a tiny compensation for everything else that we did not get to experience this year.
As the head of the introvert community, with exactly four friends in my life, I would like to add that making friends without having met anyone in person or even seen their face is a horrible experience. Since the last time I was forced to socialize, the methods seem to have changed and apparently asking someone their favourite colour doesn't qualify as a social interaction.
My 18th birthday was the best day of the year, and although my expectations were extremely low, I had the best time dressing up and getting surprised by my four friends while my hypochondriac and extremely paranoid mother hovered over my shoulder.
I struggled all year to keep up with my physical fitness while trying not to strangle my extremely motivated and fit friends around me.
As the year is nearing the end, I have gone out a total of two times for groceries and seen four people other than those who live with me. It has been extremely frustrating and scary to stay at home all these months and not know when we get to stop saying, ‘when all this is over’ and live our lives again.
The truth is, I didn't have any grand epiphanies this year, but I realised I should have said yes to a lot more plans last year than sitting home, and that there is such a thing as too much free time, which was something I had not anticipated as a sleep-deprived 12th grader.
I also seem to have gradually started absorbing my brother’s terrible sense of humour and can sing along to a horrifying number of Tik-Tok songs, which cannot be a good sign, so please send along your prayers (and brownies) for my sanity. What a year!
Mirali Sridhar
20/UCMA/112
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