Teetering on the Edge: Navigating the COVID University Experience
I felt like I was teetering on the edge of a cliff and at any minute I would fall.
Going to university as an eighteen-year-old is a daunting and frightening experience for many people. Going to university in the middle of a pandemic with multiple mental-health diagnoses and never having spent more than four days alone and away from home is an entirely different level of daunting and frightening.
The cliff was university and I was on the edge. I had friends who had happily taken the leap and jumped from secluded Cornish villages to high-rise student flats in the middle of London. Meanwhile, after a week two hours up the road on the University of Exeter’s Streatham campus, I was packing my bags, handing in my room key, and transferring to Cornwall. I felt like I had failed in some way, and rather than diving into university like the Olympic diving team, I had tripped on the board and gone hurtling off the edge with a bellyflop. For a long time - during and after that first horrendous week of avoiding my flat-mates, little sleep, and obsessing about the cleanliness of the kitchen - I didn’t think I could handle being at university. I remember thinking that I should just drop out because I couldn’t do it, and if I kept going, I would just fail anyway. Whatever failure actually means. I realised that those exact words had gone through my head when I began my GCSEs, and again when I started my A-Levels. There was no evidence that I ‘couldn’t do it’. Some way or another I had gotten through and was still intact.
Going to university in the middle of a pandemic with multiple mental-health diagnoses and never having spent more than four days alone and away from home is an entirely different level of daunting and frightening.
The transfer shook me up like a sediment jar. I don’t tend to cope very well when I believe I am to do one thing and then suddenly don’t. In some ways, the pandemic’s impact on university initially left me feeling similarly. I had expectations about what I believed university would be like - expectations that had been shaped throughout my entire life - only to arrive and find that the pandemic had changed nearly everything. I was living at home, at a university I didn’t expect to be at, learning online, and finding it difficult to meet people or make friends. My eating disorder relapsed at Christmas, my grandfather very sadly passed away, and I found myself wondering more and more ‘what am I doing?’. I felt permanently stressed: like all the work I had to do and will ever have to do over the next four years, was sitting on my shoulders or jabbing me in the back at every possible moment, reminding me that it was there and that I hadn’t yet done it. I’ve never been ‘good’ at relaxing. I couldn’t get my brain to be quiet. I described it to my mum as being like a radio inside your head that’s on twenty-four hours a day, every day.
Suddenly the first term was finished and I was heading into my second. I couldn’t believe how quickly those first twelve weeks went. I still can’t. Nothing catastrophic had happened: I hadn’t been asked to leave for forgetting the name of the village in Goldsmith’s poem ‘The Deserted Village’ (Auburn), nor been unable to attend seminars because of my anxiety. So I decided to toe the line of my comfort zone. I joined a few societies and was elected to join their committees. I completed my Exeter Award which I had been putting off because of the final interview. I applied for an internship. I put myself forward for an intercontinental student focus group looking at the impact of the pandemic on teaching and learning and university. These are opportunities that in September I would never have considered being able to do. I still get anxious whenever a society wants to meet up now that lockdown restrictions are gradually easing, and I know that university is never likely to return to what it once was. But for all that this year has thrown our way, I can truthfully say that I think I have salvaged my bellyflop. Maybe falling off the cliff wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
