Personal essay by Mary Frances Ruskell, CNN
(CNN) — It was the first day that felt like spring in New Hampshire, and college students swarmed the green in front of the colonial buildings on campus to hang out in the longed-for sun.
It wasn’t even warm yet, at least to me. Back home in South Carolina, the temperatures were already reaching the 80s. But the students on the campus where I will likely attend college littered the grass anyway, and dozens of speakers, all playing different music, created a delightful layering of noise.
It was a stark contrast to the first time I had ever visited a college, four years ago, when I was tagging along for my older brother’s college tour.
Campuses were empty during our car trip up and down the Eastern Seaboard. None offered tours for prospective students. No students laughed outside. Instead, one university had yellow-shirt-clad security guards driving around on golf carts and ensuring that anyone walking around outside wore a paper mask. Another campus had biohazard-orange signs posted around its edges, warning strangers against entering.
That was during the 2020-2021 school year. I was in eighth grade, when we ate lunch outside in winter coats at school. We sat alone in assigned spots, two kids on opposite ends of a 6-foot-long (nearly 2-meter-long) picnic table to maximize the distance between us. I carried a battered and fraying paperback copy of J.D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey” in my too-big coat’s pocket, even after I’d finished reading it.
Covid-19 regulations were in full swing that school year. I felt lucky to return to in-person school, yet I was the loneliest I have ever been.
It’s been five years since the Covid-19 lockdowns began, and we’re beginning to see how it affected my generation. In some magical way, I’ve almost forgotten it ever happened. I have blocked out the absurdity — and the loneliness.
Growing up, at a distance
That first Covid year was filled with mindfulness exercises in homeroom, encouragement to do yoga, meditate, reflect and journal in the morning announcements. You have the power to improve yourself and your life was their message. I like to think — I sincerely hope — it was because adults understood that the isolation that came with social distancing was hurting us. But no one mentioned another possibility: If you have the power to change yourself for the better, you have the power to screw yourself up, too.
How do you know if you’re changing for the better if you have little input from peers, if you have no friends around in real life to sort out new ideas, new identities, new interests?
There’s so much research that says adolescents need to be surrounded by peers, need to have friends, to help shape their identity and feel a sense of belonging. As kids reach adolescence, they become increasingly more independent from their families. It’s natural to pull away from our parents. Detachment helps kids to become more autonomous, preparing them for adulthood, when they’ll strike out on their own. Friends are there to fill some of the gaps, helping each other grow into new, more independent people.
What happens when you place an entire generation, one that’s still growing up, under quarantine and social distancing rules? And you do it, not for days or months, but for years?
I think about the kids whose schools were closed for a year or more, who were homebound for months. How can you begin to separate from your parents if you’re constantly with them? If they’re your only companions?
When school was shut down in the final few months of seventh grade, I was ecstatic. It had been a hard year. We were all 13 or nearly 13, and all in the throes of puberty. Acne, smelliness, mood swings and massive bodily changes plagued us. Going home for the last eight weeks of school felt like a respite that I treasured.
Online school was a drag, but I got through it OK. At home, I bonded with my older brother, with whom I only used to fight. We were once so nasty toward each other that one of my mother’s biggest sadnesses was how much we seemed to hate each other. I grew much closer to my parents, too.
My friends and I still talked through texting and group chats. There were dozens of chats with dozens of combinations of people. But for me, they didn’t feel warm, communal or fun.I felt disconnected, cut off from organic conversations that someone replies to immediately because you’re right there in front of them and from conversations being joined by people you don’t really know well enough to text or have a group chat with.
I guess I was lucky that I was only home for a few months. My time at home was freeing and family-centered. I did miss my friends, but it was an idle, half-thought longing.
Returning to school
In August of 2020, I went back to in-person school for my eighth-grade year. At school, my friends were right there in front of me but untouchable and unreachable. Our desks were far apart, and we were all masked. You couldn’t whisper to your friends anymore.You could barely talk, except during a short recess. Even then, we had to be masked and stand far apart. It was hard to read expressions, hear inflections. We all were inhabiting the same space, but I did not feel like we were together.
It became our moral duty to be lonely. There were reminders plastered everywhere to stay 6 feet apart. We were told we were “protecting each other” if we stayed away from other people, that we were empathetic, caring and good members of society.
If someone was seen hanging out with people, close and maskless, they must be a bad person. They must be selfish. They must not care about human life. They must not want to protect society. This is what we were told. To feel intense guilt for a basic, once-accepted human desire for companionship hurt. Staying away from people became celebrated, a moral good.
It seemed to me that a new expectation permeated American life: We should be OK with being alone. If we were not, we were weak or even bad people.
But what does it do when children internalize the idea that they are bad, careless people if they want to spend time with friends?
We are starting to know what the effect was
Young Americans (18-29 years old) are still struggling with profound social effects five years later, according to a March 2025 poll from the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One in five became more socially isolated.
Of those young Americans who reported social isolation during the pandemic, 55% also reported depressive symptoms. Even among those who said the pandemic had no long-term effects on their friendships, 38% still reported depressive symptoms. Fewer than half of all surveyed said they felt a sense of community in their current life.
The study also showed that present-day isolation rates vary by age. Researchers found the highest levels of isolation were reported among those who were entering their first years of high school or college during the lockdowns. Those kids, now 19 and 23 years old, had isolation rates of 38% and 40%, respectively. Among 20-year-olds, only one year older, only 23% reported social isolation.
Looking back, five years later, I don’t know who I would’ve been now, without the Covid restrictions. I don’t know what might have happened if I, and the rest of my generation, had experienced a more typical path to adulthood. What would we be like if we had been surrounded by peers to help form our growing selves in those crucial years of early adolescence?
I feel like I’ve missed something essential about growing up, but I don’t know what. And I am aware that I was actually one of the luckiest of my generation: I have kind parents, I was happy at home, my school reopened as soon as possible, and the teachers and staff there cared deeply about our well-being and did all they could to support us students.
I carried that book in my jacket pocket as something of a talisman. I saw myself in the main character Franny. She was older and cooler than me, but she was also trying to figure out her place in the world and who she was. What I loved about Franny was that when she tried to change her life for the better, she utterly failed. She sent herself spiraling into an emotional meltdown of spiritual pain and confusion. She was a warning that I remember as I prepare to enter college in a few short months.
I reread “Franny and Zooey” every year, and I will pack it for college wherever I go. Franny may have started my love of the book, but what made me carry it in my pocket like a religious medal was her brother Zooey’s advice to her: You cannot forget the value of humanity, no matter what happens. You cannot view yourself as separate, as other. You cannot let your sadness at the state of the world grow personal. To cut yourself off from people is to lose your connection and way in a glorious, terrifying world.
In those depressive and lonely days of Covid, that idea was a lifeline.
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