Maren Orchard Interview, April 20, 2020

SEGMENT SYNOPSIS: Humanities Truck Graduate Fellow Maren Orchard explores how the pandemic has impacted her life, especially as a final year graduate student. She shares how she has been struggling with the uncertainty of her next steps amid a pandemic, yet reflects upon the privilege she has to make certain decisions. SUBJECTS: COVID-19; (Washington, D.C.)

I'm Maren, and I am a graduate fellow working with the Humanities Truck project. My being a graduate student is the main lens I'm viewing the world through right now during this crisis. So I'm a second year student, so that means that I am graduating in May.

And I know that this period is always kind of emotional and full of uncertainty and trying to figure out kind of like what next steps are. And I think it's uniquely exacerbated by there being this COVID-19 pandemic, in that job prospects are even more uncertain. And there's even less clarity for kind of like what next steps are.

When we first went online for the rest of the semester, a lot of my friends were asking like, oh, are you going to go home, like, are you going to stay in Washington DC? And that moment created a lot of turmoil in myself and I know in a lot of my colleagues in my program, because when you're in a graduate program, you're focusing so hard on building community and making a new home for yourself. And so I was immediately pretty sure that I didn't want to leave, that my home is here, that my networks are here. But that was a really, really tough decision. And it's also, it's a privilege to have the decision, which was also something to kind of wrestle with.

So right now, I'm working on finishing my classes, working this job and a contract job, and also just kind of trying to help sustain all of the people that matter most to me, and working as a graduate representative as well for my program and checking in with people and seeing how people are coping, trying to make sure people have access to resources and are somewhere safe. And so it's just been an emotional weight that I think is hard to account for.

Something I've personally really struggled with is the recognition that other people are in worse positions than I am. And that creates a lot of like, guilt and shame around your own emotions of like sadness and fear and anxiety, anger. Fear, especially. It's just that like recognizing that so many people are in worse positions. And I think it's really, really hard to wrestle with what it feels like we're allowed to feel during this time. And that's something I've heard a lot of people are struggling with.

What's sustaining me right now are calls with my family. We do calls every Sunday night. I just recently had my 24th birthday, and I know that I received a lot of love on that day and that week, and that was really special. I have two really great roommates, the third went home. And it's meant a lot to me to kind of get to know them better, and to have that other friendly face to see in person to talk to. And someone to share some sweet treats or if I've baked some bread with. And that's really special.

And also just talking a lot with other folks in my cohort and in my program and talking with kind of those emotions of like, am I in the right place? Should I go home? I know that people have it worse than me, but I'm having a really bad day and I don't know like how to feel about it. So having that network that has kind of like a similar experience right now has been really, really important to finding some kind of balance.

I've also been trying to cook a lot, I'm out of groceries right now. But trying to cook a lot, and just finding little things to find joy, including like taking a walk and smiling at my neighbors, enjoying sitting on my porch, sitting in the backyard.

But I do also just want to say that what I hope changes from this is that I recognize what a privilege it is that I am relatively financially stable, so long as I have a job through July. But there are so many people who don't have that support. And we're really lacking in structures to provide support for our communities, most marginalized folks, the undocumented, the unhoused. And I just hope that from this, we realize that there are no safety nets for folks struggling and I hope that we're able to put systems in place to provide better care for our most vulnerable citizens, because it's absolutely immoral not to be finding better care in the face of this.

So that's really what I hope comes from this, is that we just better ourselves individually, but also in our communities and then structurally at the national level. Which is a lot to hope for. But I'm finding that those hopes are what are sustaining me right now.