It was mid-March, and I stood in the middle of the Heathrow Airport, passport in hand with four hours to spare. After abruptly leaving my homestay in Seville, Spain, the night before, I would be spending the night in the airport hotel.
Although I cried in the taxi as I left Seville, the trek home through three international airports (Seville, Barcelona, London) was oddly thrilling. I didn’t spend much time sleeping because I knew that this was my last chance to soak up all that was unfamiliar.
I passed the night walking aimlessly around the hotel trying to find a vegetable (I felt like that would make things better).
I ended the night with a baguette and Diet Pepsi sitting criss-cross applesauce on the floor of my room (That also made things better). Whether it was watching old vlogs on Youtube or staring out at the highway, I knew one thing I didn’t want to do was sleep. I could sleep plenty when I was back in my childhood bedroom!
Left: Some much needed wine at 7 a.m. at the Seville airport,
Right: Enjoying my Terminal 3 Oasis
After a sleepless night, it’s no surprise that I was four hours early for my flight home. I have never liked being late, and I have a particular passion for roaming airport shops (and I still needed a vegetable....). Also, spending money on magazines, gum, and a neck pillow felt right as the world around me spun into a universal chaos.
Okay, I killed an hour, I thought to myself.
If I kill three more hours, I might kill $300, I worried.
“Megan Brubaker?!” I heard a familiar voice from an unclear distance away.
As I looked around, I saw two of my high school friends, who I hadn’t seen in over a year. They were also making their trip back to Pittsburgh after leaving their prospective abroad locations.
Sydney Brown (Left) and Ryan Wilkinson (right) at the Heathrow Airport lol
Delirious: I thought that this was hilarious, of course. Who could have imagined that after months of not seeing each other, our common ground would be the Heathrow Airport? Definitely not 2019 me.
Amidst all of the unfamiliarity and chaos, we made our way to the airport’s bar for a drink and spent the next three hours catching up and laughing about the circumstances. The comfort of old friends was the most familiar encounter I had experienced in two months.
In no spinoff of my imagination could I have planned for it, but I didn’t realize how badly I needed that moment until I heard my name yelled across the Heathrow Airport four hours before my premature flight home to Pittsburgh.
When I mull over 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic, the emotion that I confront often is a longing for the past, present and future all at once. A longing for what the past could have been, what I expected the present to be, and what I know the future can no longer be.
When I first came face-to-face with these wrenching feelings, I wrestled with them. I told myself that they weren’t worth engaging with. Wallowing over how much had been swept out from under us wasn’t going to reverse it.
But over the past nine months, I have found that this sense of longing is like a craving. The more I avoid it, the more intense it feels. So as my 2020 reflection, I felt that it was important to validate our longings while also unraveling a new perspective that I found as I lost my grip on each of them all at once.
If 2020 taught me one thing, it’s that you can’t plan for the good or the bad in life. If you’re lucky, you can plan for the in-between, but we typically aren’t excited or worried about it enough to plan for it.
And while 2020 proved to me that I cannot plan for much, I have learned to be grateful for that fact. While oftentimes the bad, hard parts of life feel unbearable, there also seems to be an unplanned good, greater than anything I could have premeditated.
What The Past Could Have Been
I don’t know whether to feel nostalgic or concerned that when I hear a TikTok song, I am immediately teleported back to a single moment in ambiguous-quarantine-time. I also would never have planned for my top Spotify song of 2020 to be the Jeopardy Theme Song. 2019 me was planning much greater markers of the year, as I’m sure most everyone else was.
Typically, when the past doesn’t go to plan, it is rooted in regret.
I wish I hadn’t done that.
I wish I had said what was on my mind.
I wish I had done that thing that I have always wanted to do.
The “lost time” to COVID-19 is unique in that it cannot be traced back to any decision that we made. The initial course that it ran was inevitable before we even knew we would be in its path. Whether you lost time in school, a sports season, or family gatherings, it is important to acknowledge this loss unapologetically while simultaneously ridding yourself of any regret.
With such a universal loss, we have each individually discovered what truly matters to us. And when we feel a fresh pit in our stomachs, it means that there was something out there that used to fill it.
This pain of losing an experience or a milestone is countered by the strength that each of us exemplified by moving forward each day as we grappled with uncertainty of what would come next.
I can not sit here as we near the end of 2020 and act as though we should be grateful for the curveballs it threw us. If I’m being honest, I still look back at months that I had planned to spend traveling or working and feel a pit that cannot be filled by the blind hope that I somehow “made the most of the year.”
What I will say, though, is that we deserve to be grateful for our past selves and the fact that we get to carry that version of ourselves forward: A version of ourselves that can have everything ripped out from under it and still holds a robust will to keep going.
The Present & Redefining Expectations
Going home for winter break used to be a time that I craved desperately by the time it came around. But this year, there is a moat of anxiety blocking relaxation. It’s easy to diminish the achievement of finishing a 1.5 semesters of school online or working a 9-5 from home with needy dogs and/or family.
Humans adapt quickly. We learned to find a routine all under one roof, host gatherings over Zoom and make whipped coffee. With this in mind, we also need to adapt our current expectations for ourselves and the definition of success as we adjust to the world around us.
It is sometimes easier to succumb to changes around us than changes within ourselves. Expectations, goals, and plans for 2020 either looked different or fell through completely. As we reach the end of the year, feelings of restlessness and inadequacy arise as we resist the possibility that we should be going easier on ourselves.
As we long for the normalcy of the past and hope of a cured future, we feel stuck in the middle facing the present. While we know that the normalcy that we crave will return somehow, the present day can be the least optimistic of how we perceive time.
Each day, we awaken to news headlines. And since March, it has no longer felt like an option to view them:
“WHO says mysterious illness in China likely being caused by new virus”
“First Covid-19 outbreak in a U.S. nursing home raises concerns”
“In a time of distancing due to coronavirus, the health threat of loneliness looms.”
“Winter is coming: Why America’s window of opportunity to beat back Covid-19 is closing.”
“Oxygen supply issues forced five L.A. hospitals to declare an internal disaster.”
The crises of the world are spelled out in headlines, but the daily person’s experience is much more complicated than a news update. We are experiencing losses, uncertainty, and even joy.
I believe that the present is the hardest to grapple with because we do not have the 20/20 vision of hindsight or the blind optimism for the future. And while it can sometimes feel impossible to shut the world out and focus on the current moment, we all deserve to be easier on ourselves and prioritize our headlines, the good, bad, and in-between. One day, we will look back on these moments and want to either remember or learn from them. Now, our only responsibility is to experience them.
Looking Toward the Future
There’s no doubt it can feel pretty heavy looking back on the past and sitting with the present. This year has altered each of us in ways that we could never have anticipated. So as I look toward the future, I feel the tip-tapping anticipation of a dog awaiting his overdue walk or a kid bolting to their parents room to open their gifts on Christmas morning.
While I am not sure exactly what awaits, I feel eager to experience the world again with the mindset that I’ve grown into over this past year.
What could be waiting for us might be a Barbie Dream House or a lump of coal, I’m not sure yet. But the sense of anticipation is something that I’m trying my best to treasure. Once normalcy returns (and is redefined), we will have plenty of opportunities to get used to it again, but we hopefully will not have another time to long for it so intensely.
Moving forward, tune into what you’re craving (I sound like an intuitive eating coach, but this time I’m talking about your soul. Can you tell I watched the Pixar movie?).
Think about what it is that you learned about yourself, those that you love, and the world. What are the little moments that create the life we know and love?
For me, it’s spontaneous interactions with your friend’s friend’s sister, people-watching and deciding whether a couple is on their first or third date, and seeing young teenagers on the street that intimidate me, to name a few.
It’s moments like sitting criss-cross-apple-sauce in the London airport hotel, surrounded by an unfamiliar chaos and being one shout away from an old friend that gave me a new appreciation for tuning into what’s in front of me, no matter how much isn't going to plan.
Sure, I could spend the rest of my life dwelling over what I could have done in Spain or what my senior year would look like had none of this happened. But when I think back, I remember that Diet Pepsi and baguette fondly. And honestly, it isn’t because it tasted good. It’s because, after everything had been flipped upside down, I still had those comforts and myself to carry me through it.
That is what I will take forward with me. I know that there will be plenty of greatness to come, but there will never be a moment like that one. Whatever that moment is for you, cherish it unapologetically.
We’ve learned the hard way that these “normal,” everyday occurrences are much more fragile than we think. It’s the connections with the barista that memorized your order, the eclectic Uber driver, and bathroom friends at the bar that add up and become headlines of our lives.
We now have a hopefully-once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to approach all that the future has to offer with a gentleness and appreciation that our fast-paced world often shuts down. I hope that we can embrace it fully.
My 2020 Grid that Just Makes Sense
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