How have students at Arapahoe Community College felt since the strong changes brought on by COVID-19? #COVIDDiariesOfACC is a mini-series composed of non-fiction diary entries from students at ACC. Thank you to the student contributing writers for these pieces to publish on the Arapahoe Pinnacle.

By Ace Capp

I don’t have anywhere I need to go. My sleep schedule is adjusting to its biological default, which generally leaves me getting up in the afternoons and going to bed sometime around midnight. My friends are all stuck in their various homes as well, and we’ve been communicating over Discord and Zoom. I’ve been expected to be more available, as a consequence of having nowhere to go, but the present situation has not changed the fact that I do not generally carry my phone with me when I’m at home.

The stay-at-home order doesn’t really affect me that much. School was the only thing I really did regularly that I went places for, so I’m fine hanging out at home and doing mostly what I spent my free time doing, anyways. My parents are getting some cabin fever, and I’ve already been press-ganged into yard work once, but other than that it’s pretty much business as usual.
My greatest challenge is probably going to be keeping up with my schoolwork. I signed up to go into that building every day because I know I work better that way. I’m disappointed that I won’t be able to celebrate my birthday with my friends this year. I was looking forward to getting a group together for cake, games, and movies. Also, I cannot find the rubric information for Mondays assignment.
I was pleasantly surprised by my ability to finish a season of a show I was watching, and then start and finish watching another show instead of the next season of the first one. Anyways Epithet Erased is my new hyper fixation and Giovanni Potage is a good character.

I’m concerned that I’m going to fail this semester at college because I struggle with self-organization and the crippling existential dread that has been constantly nipping at the heels of my mind since I was twelve years old has not been helped by being in actual quarantine as a preventative measure against being infected by a literal plague during a fascist regime similar in nature to the one that drove my grandmother from her home country in her youth. I’m tiring myself out keeping up with the expectations of availability and socialization. I’m worried that this might last over a year and that I might have more than one birthday by myself. I’m probably going to develop some form of agoraphobia by the end of this, and at least one of my friends already has. I’m so worried about so much that the only coping mechanism available to me is not to think about it too hard. Other than that I’m fine tho.