COVID-19 Helped Me Adjust to Life After College
By: Ryan Fan
Tags: Coronavirus, Spirituality, Mental Health, Self, Life

COVID-19 Helped Me Adjust to Life After College

Humility is a thankless virtue, but it’s a worthy one.

Photo: Matus Karahuta/Unsplash

My life after college wasn’t easy since I plunged into a very difficult job as a special ed teacher in inner-city Baltimore. But my first year of teaching is over, which is a very difficult part of a teaching career for anyone, especially in the environment that I teach in.

There is one thing that has helped me adjust to my new job with a new life in a new city: COVID-19. In March, lockdowns started, and we transitioned to virtual learning, which was difficult for everyone to transition to, but a break from me from the physical classroom as I navigated technology well and taught some of my older colleagues how to do so as well.

The majority of my older friends, after they graduated college, had a rough time transitioning to life after college. Whether they worked or went to graduate school, a lot of my friends suffered from depression as they adjusted to whole new lives or a shakeup of their lives as it was. And it’s completely valid that they did, as well as the fact that many of my friends who didn’t have employment after graduating did.

According to Frohlich and Keough in a 2018 study in medical journal, Addictive Behaviors Reports, depression often occurs right after many young adults complete their university schoolwork. Many college graduates feel significant pressure to get a job or get into graduate school right away and feel sadness leaving their friends and life behind.

“When people face an obstacle that threatens their identity, mental health may become compromised,” said Dr. Matt Glowiak at the Southern New Hampshire (SNHU).

I struggled with a lot of the sadness and identity crises that many of my friends suffered through as well. However, I had a much smoother transition than most — my last year of college was not that rosy. I was glad, in a lot of respects to be out of college, and I already had those feelings of transition long before I graduated.

What helped me fully emotionally accept my identity transition from college life to my working adult life, was the coronavirus. There’s a shared suffering that clearly everyone is going through, and everyone is going through a time of heavy transition and abrupt shakeups in their lives, where we finally realize something we should be all grateful for:

Being alive.

No one knows what’s going on, how long we’re going through the pandemic, or when a vaccine is going to be developed. We’re all in a common state of ignorance as well as a common state of confusion. For all those reasons, I am lucky. And I am a lot luckier than most. My job as a teacher, despite the fact that I believe it’s underpaid and underrespected, is a stable profession where I didn’t have to worry about being laid off. I was able to find a summer job at Amazon. I’m going back to my teaching job in a couple of weeks.

Most of us are living through the same experience, but for me, separating myself from my identity as a college student is something that wasn’t complete until the pandemic. Sure, I was very busy on intense and highly chaotic days at my school, but busyness was just a way to distract myself from finding my identity in who I was — although the big umbrella is my faith, I am cautious about putting so much of identity in my profession. During the pandemic, in addition to transitioning to a whole different kind of work, I started running more and writing more.

I have always struggled with independence in the sense that I’ll need the validation of tons of people before I make any big decision. The pandemic has forced me into being comfortable with my own solitude. For example, I have always hated running alone, but given the constraints of social distancing, I now have to run alone all the time. I still don’t love it, but I have always found motivation and validation externally in a lot of aspects of my life.

Writing is much more of a social event in the pandemic as I have turned to communities of writers for my craft. Because I have found so much solidarity in the writing community as well as fun in the writing process myself, I have been writing more than ever.

But I can’t focus so much on the validation of others anymore. Now, I’m being forced to make evaluations and decisions for myself and by myself. My girlfriend has been a great person to spend time with throughout, and my relationship has really strengthened during the pandemic too, given that we now spend so much time together every single day.

I am no longer a college student, but rather just an adult doing the best I can. I am a teacher by trade, writer by side trade, and runner by hobby, and a Christian above all of those labels. I really struggled to find my place in the world post-college, and I especially struggled with finding my own authority to make my own decisions and finding my own motivation.

Knowing that everyone else is similarly struggling now, however, living through the loss, pain, and disruption of the pandemic, I find a strange kind of solace. It’s the kind of solace I used to feel when I felt excruciating pain at the end of my cross country races, but I still had my teammates running with me. There were people I went through excruciating physical pain with that I would never go through with anyone else.

COVID has been a painful time, for me, for you, and likely for everybody. Some people have admitted that they have been doing better during the pandemic, but regardless of where we stand, life is extremely different from what it was five months ago. It’s hard to see a foreseeable future where life will go back to normal, and these are platitudes I have heard and said for months now, but what I will also say is that COVID has made me and my friends collectively more on edge. I feel like I have become more easy to anger and perpetually more irritable.

It’s not excusable to be more of an asshole all of the time. That’s my gripe and fear with self-improvement — sometimes, improving too much makes you less sympathetic to people who can’t. Sometimes, once you pull yourself up from your depths and bootstraps, you tend to extrapolate your success to others, a mindset I want to avoid.

Humility is a thankless virtue, but it’s a worthy one.

Few things have humbled me more than the pandemic has, in both revealing the limitations of myself and everything around me. And in a weird way, I appreciate it because I have effectively moved on from college and adjusted to post-collegiate life.