Eleanor Citron is a student at the University of Chicago, studying history and human rights.

On March 12, just days after I had returned home to Boston to complete my final papers, I scrolled through Facebook and came across Wellesley Professor Dan Chiasson’s New Yorker article “The Corona Virus and the Ruptured Narrative of Campus Life.” In those days since I had left Chicago, I was struggling to articulate just what I was feeling about this sudden departure from campus—or “home,” as my iPhone’s camera roll now refers to it as. 

With the weirdest tunnel vision, I scrambled to gather what felt like 400 books, hordes of paper with Jstor articles I had barely touched throughout the quarter, and a few pieces of clothing that I liked. I hadn’t had time to say goodbye to my friends, my professors, or the corners of campus that meant the most to me. As a Type 1 diabetic, all I knew was that I just had to come home; I get sick really easily, I am deeply immunocompromised, and my parents just didn’t want me to be stuck in a place where they were not during this time of uncertainty. This exam period felt different than others; rather than rushing to finish my papers, I was instead trying to get out of a city that had grown to mean so much to me. I felt rather empty, like my insides had been hollowed out and thrown away without my permission, without even giving me time to think.

When I read Chiasson’s article, I felt some of those irreconcilable and confused thoughts fall into place. He talks about how college life takes on a narrative form; it ebbs and flows with the weather, taking in a story that both coheres to the external world and behaves on its own. Professor Chiasson refers to his spring syllabi as those which tell “an especially thrilling and encouraging story,” reflective of the increasingly longer days, the swelling and bursting of flower blooms, the strengthening of relationships, “then bees, fireflies, exams… and listen[ing] to the speakers at commencement.” In the face of global pandemic, however, this timeline is stunted, quelled altogether.

From what I hear from my friends who are still on campus, my second home is currently but a shell of itself. But I can’t help but think of how we—its students, the people who serve as the fuel which drives the place—are but shells of ourselves too. College is a seedbed for the growth of the individual. There, we are nourished by the books we are compelled to read and challenged by the people we meet and the experiences we have. We walk away from things—whether it’s a class discussion, a conversation in a coffee shop, or a frat party—having learned something new about the people we encounter and the places we inhabit. But more than anything, these things shape us as individuals, our values and conceptions of the world.

I don’t really know if this type of personal growth can happen from behind a computer screen, facilitated by an application like Zoom. And I’m no stranger to thinking about the power of technology; my mother, Danielle Citron, is a Professor of Law at Boston University and a 2019 recipient of the MacArthur fellowship for her work on the reaches of technology and abuses of online communities. 

I grew up thinking about technology and what it all means. Dinners were spent discussing proper digital citizenship and technological advances both exciting and questionable (for example, the advent of an artificial pancreas for diabetics like me or deepfake videos which suggest someone has said or done things they may not necessarily have done, respectively). I can’t help but think back to those conversations, particularly at a moment as crucial as this.

Those moments of personal growth as fostered in college may cease for the time being—I am sad to think of how my senior friends and family won’t get a proper graduation, and how the college kid may have been deprived of some personal moment of epiphany, of total self-realization—but there’s something bigger at stake here. The narrative of the individual may be under assault, but we seem to lose sight of how our collective story is under fire.

I keep reading about how doctors don’t have access to protective masks and seeing memes about how no one can find toilet paper at the grocery store. My dad wakes up at 5:00 am to buy groceries once a week, and each time he returns with even greater fears for the elderly and the immunocompromised. In this time of great uncertainty, I have come to realize that the narrative of today is not one meant for us resilient college kids. Rather, it’s a story which tests the limits of humanity. It’s time for us to be citizens—not just digital citizens on Zoom, but citizens of the communities in which we reside. It’s time to think about how we currently engage with the world and what we can do to make it a better place. 

For the time being, I’m sheltering in place: I’m attending classes online, I’m reading the news, and I’m continuing to teach debate remotely to kids in Chicagoland schools. My friends are running errands for the elderly and the immunocompromised, and they’re donating dry and canned goods to food pantries. Perhaps, in temporarily embracing a much more solitary life, we can work collectively to think in ways more outward facing. In the smallest of ways—in staying home, in ordering food from a small business nearby—we can sustain our communities both immediate and far away.

It's true—my laptop has become my best friend. And though I miss the feeling of never-being-alone that comes with college life, I know I’ll have that experience again. The frameworks of college will go on; things will resume and return to normalcy. But, like with any story, there’s room for analysis in the world of today. Rather than conceive the narrative of “me” as the formative one, perhaps it is the story of “we” that demands further consideration. At least for now it does.