A Loss of the Time of Your Life. How the pandemic changed the lives of…
By: Stevie Rowley
Tags: Personal Experience, Covid 19, New York City, Covid Diaries, College Covid 19

Dasha In Her Room Taken By Dasha Balashova

Dasha Balashova

For Dasha Balashova, the pandemic threw her out of New York City and back to Palo Alto, California. “I wouldn’t call it a transition. It was very abrupt,” she says. She recounts spring break getting extended for a week and everyone complaining about being home for two weeks. Now, it’s almost been a year.

According to Balashova, California has changed during this time. “People seem a lot more distant, which is odd in California. I’m used to that in New York, but here people will say ‘hi’ to each other,” she says. People are scared of each other; the pandemic has managed to take the friendliness even out of Californians.

Like Rowley, Balashova had to learn to be alone. “I just learned how to spend time with myself. I’m very much a people person, and so sometimes it’s hard for me to be alone for long periods of time. But I’m definitely kind of grateful for that. I think that’s a good skill to have,” she says.

She’s grateful for FaceTime. “If this thing happened 20 years ago, I don’t know what I would do then,” she says. At the same time, she longs for time spent with friends with no specific goal. “When you FaceTime someone, you still feel like you gotta update each other on something, at least talk about the smallest thing… I miss hanging out with my friends and not having to do anything.” Her best friend from home, Keili FitzGerald, also goes to school in New York and moved back in August. She says, “There are some things that I just can’t tell you over the phone. I need to be sitting on the couch next to you. And sometimes I just want to spend time with you, but if I call you, I feel like I have nothing to say.” This semester is the longest time the two have ever spent apart.

Instead of walking to class in the morning, Balashova now does most of them from her bedroom. Rather than hanging out in Washington Square Park after class or smoking cigarettes with classmates outside the university entrance on 5th Avenue, she works with kids. “I work at a school [in Campbell, California], and I’m a first-grade Spanish and Art History teacher. She got offered the job through family friends — the school’s owners — who called her over the summer and offered a position with the summer camp; then, they asked her to stay for the school year. “It has nothing to do with what I actually want to do,” she says, but at least it’s something to keep her busy.

Moving back in with her mom was a sudden loss of independence. It was hard “not being able to do the dishes the way that I want to do them… or my mom walking into my room,” Balashova says. “It’s like, can you knock?” With time, though “we found like a good balance, my mom and I,” she says. They’ve fought less, too. “I think it’s really because there’s nothing to fight about because I’m not doing anything that she doesn’t want me to do.” Regardless of the disagreements the pair has had, Dasha’s mom, Inna Balashova, says that the pair “did spend some good, good time together,” but that she felt bad that Dasha had to come home instead of living her own life.

Balashova plans to return to New York in January. She just applied to an apartment in the East Village with three of her close friends.