April 5, 2021

Life After the Vaccine

By Lizzie Insoft

When I recently decided I would be returning to my childhood summer camp this year as a counselor, I soon felt COVID’s presence looming over my camp’s operations, prompting me to question how normal this summer would feel. The entire concept of normal feels skewed by the pandemic. The terms “old normal”, “new normal”, and “when we’re back to normal” seem to be strung into every other sentence, and now the concept of normalcy is just warped. It wasn’t until I received a notification from my camp that being a counselor made me eligible for the vaccine that I began to think about what such a return to normalcy would look like. 

For a 19-year-old college student, getting a COVID vaccine appeared to be a distant dream, and far in the future at that. Little did I know that come this summer, the world may finally begin to reset. So, after making a 45 minute trip to a Rite-Aid in Michigan, I received my first dose of the Moderna vaccine last week. The endeavor felt simulated yet the result was all the same: I had been vaccinated. While the world is still reeling from the pandemic, more and more Americans are becoming vaccinated: the concept of normalcy doesn’t feel as far away. People are starting to hug their grandparents, see family for the holidays, and talk to strangers. While all of this is consistent with life before, personally, a transition to college during COVID means that normal isn’t normal at all. 

As far as I know it, the college experience consists of lectures, discussions, and meetings, all taken from the same desk. To me and my friends, having somewhere to be is few and far between. While the concept of normal, for many, brings comfort and peace, there are also so many of us that have lost normal and don’t know what next year, or even this summer, is going to look like. While getting a COVID vaccine was a moment of celebration, it was also a moment of realization that my routines and practices are all, rather than returning to what they were, changing completely. Being a college sophomore is going to feel more like being a freshman again. These upcoming changes are both daunting and exciting. Michigan students are success driven, and that work ethic is evident across our campus. But, what makes Michigan the place its known to be is the social liberation from our daily grind. While amidst the pandemic Ann Arbor is alive and well, knowing that the vibrancy of campus is only on the uphill provides a constant reminder of just how good we have it.  

The world so desperately wants to go back to “normal”, but after getting my vaccine, I realized that no one’s sense of normalcy is the same, and for me, “normal” doesn’t exist anymore. Before the pandemic, I was a high school student unsure of where I was going to college, and now as the world begins to re-open, I will already be a college sophomore. Nonetheless , it isn’t like the “era” of COVID was a pause button on our lives. Rather, over the last few months, I have met some of the most important people in my life and had opportunities that my pre-pandemic self could have only dreamed of. So, with these people, I move forward, not back to normal times, but towards new times. My vaccine has given me not only a sore arm, but clarity that, while things are soon going to be very different, different is good.

Edited by Alex Vena