As I’m sure most of you have read over and over again as you scroll through your email these days, these are truly “uncertain and scary times, and I hope that this email finds you well.” And while those words are almost always sent with warmth and genuine concern, their incessant use throughout the course of online learning has it warping into a seemingly insincere and robotic line to be copied and pasted.

Amongst all the chaos that this global crisis has brought every member of the Dickinson community, now, more than ever, Dickinsonians must lean on each other. While this may seem difficult, seeing that most of us crave big hugs, the company of loved ones, and some sliver of normalcy, one way that we as a community can come together is by envisioning our shared experience. During what can only really be described as the world, as we know it, coming to a sudden pause, so many parts of our daily life have continued moving forward despite the widespread global fear, depression, and overall anxiety.  We all still continue to submit assignments, email professors, and show up to classes. Despite the somewhat shared sentiments of anxiety and grief amongst college students, we have all become pretty desensitized to the world seemingly crumbling around us, as we sign our 6th email of the day with the obligatory “I hope this email finds you safe and well”. With some of our only human contact of the day being formal Zoom lectures (completed in week-old sweatpants in your childhood bedroom) they somehow still lack intimacy.

The Women’s and Gender Resource Center has created an online page open for COVID-19 journal entries submitted by members of the Dickinson community in hopes of creating a similar sense of community that we find on campus. This page urges honest, encouraging, genuine, informal reflection of how you’ve found yourself coping with COVID-19 quarantine. You can choose to be anonymous. Hopefully, this page will become a mosaic of words of encouragement, daily anecdotes, etc., that will give insight into the lives of those within our Dickinson community. We’re all trying our best; it helps to know just how other people are too.

On this page, feel free to tell us how you are actually doing; whether it is reflected in a poem, diary entry, picture, recipe, etc., and we will share it with the rest of the Dickinson community.

Written by Lizzy Parry ’21, WGRC student worker

Image: CDC/Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins

April 22, 2020