It’d be unfair to expect students’ mental states to return to normal only a few months after more than a year-and-a-half of isolation and remote learning. Unfortunately, anxiety and depression following COVID lockdowns were an expected hurdle after stumbling out of our isolation, yet that hurdle has proven to be more troublesome than many people on campus may want to admit. As the second term of the academic year began, I found myself asking, “Even though I’m back on campus and speaking without having to unmute myself, how come I still don’t feel normal?”
I felt, and still occasionally feel, as though I haven’t recovered as fast as others — and perhaps there is some statistical merit to that. A recent survey ​​presented by the Hi, How Are You Project last November estimates college students are slowly beginning to feel better. As reported, 62% of students surveyed stated their overall anxiety levels felt higher than normal, a 23% improvement from the responses a year prior when Hi, How Are You conducted the same survey.
Despite these gains, we can’t ignore that the overwhelming majority of those polled still don’t feel right, and rightly so. Some still feel slighted or need more time to readjust to social and academic life on campus and in person. After all, we missed out on the feelings of camaraderie with our fellow students for an entire academic year plus a term.  However, I worry the student body’s collective mindset is that the path before us is a game of catch-up to normal life rather than a road to recovery.
As a community, I believe there are actions we can take to aid other students in rebuilding or repairing our emotional health, and the foremost collective action should be a series of admissions: an admission that the events of isolation and worry throughout a pandemic aren’t typical and can’t be handled as such; an admission to ourselves that we still don’t feel right due to those events even though they seem at a near end; and an admission to others that we feel this way, making them more comfortable to voice their own admissions.
Conceding to yourself that you have yet to mentally mend is no act of weakness. Comparing your rebuilding process to the ones of those around you is futile; we’re not all made of the same bricks and weren’t knocked over by the same stones. A year of stones will take time to heal from. Not being completely rebuilt doesn’t restrict you from helping others find their parts. You don’t need to feel rejuvenated in order to help rebuild someone else.
Admitting that you still feel the blows of the pandemic will open up someone else around you. Truthfully, no one still feeling off their center due to the pandemic is alone in the slightest.
“Just talking about it with my roommates helped a lot,” UO third-year student Paul Lee said. “I realized they felt the same as me, and how much weight I was carrying alone.”

Thankfully, the aforementioned survey suggests there is a population of students that seem to be realigning themselves faster than others. They may hold an important role in aiding others on campus. To those that feel ready for life to resume, that feel centered now despite the wear and tear of the past year, I only ask you to merely compensate for others that don’t. This could take several forms. For example, in class you could speak to others and openly state that it “feels weird” being back in person. Even without directly addressing problems your peers may still be facing in regards to this new reality, you help make that reality more accepting by pointing to the obvious.
Lastly, continue to check on those around you. We’ve come to an adverse course of assuming others are ready to continue without acknowledging the titanic weight of pandemic debris. It’s understandable to feel a sense of desperation to return to life as we remembered. Yet perhaps in a scramble to do so, we are leaving behind people who may not feel ready. It becomes difficult to jump back into normal life if we ourselves don’t yet feel “normal.” Moreover, if we don’t all take that jump together, life will never completely return as it was. Accepting among ourselves the reality of recovery, without rushing what damages remain in our psyches, will lead to the actual end of the pandemic on campus even after the virus is contained.