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Aira Villareal, who will receive her degree this June from San Francisco State University, talked about how "everything feels pending" as she transitions to adulthood during the pandemic. (Courtesy photo)
May 18, 2020
Nicholas Wolfram SmithFebruary was an exciting time for Aira Villareal: she had finished her undergraduate studies in health education at San Francisco State University in December, had just gotten a job with San Francisco’s Department of Public Health, and in May would be the first person in her family to graduate from college.
Now, she said, instead of a big arrival to adulthood, she feels stuck in transition.
“There’s this unsettling feeling of not knowing what's going to come next, and I don’t want to make decisions during this time because I don’t know what the reality will be of returning to work after this,” she said.Villareal started her job as a program assistant in the DPH just weeks before San Francisco issued its shelter in place orders, and said it has been “weird to not see coworkers or develop the type of relationships you would in a normal work setting.”
Especially as a recent graduate, she said, she looked forward to learning from her boss, which can’t happen the same way over email or the phone.“I was so excited to have a big adult job, going to downtown, and then it’s like ‘just kidding, you have to stay home.’”
A natural extrovert, Villareal said it had been hard to keep up with communities important to her, like SFSU’s Newman Club, which she belonged to as an undergraduate, and adjust to not going to church or seeing family and friends.
While Villareal has not been affected by the economic downturn, she said most of her peers had been laid off during shelter in place, including all of her roommates, who are also mostly recent graduates.
“It’s definitely taken an emotional toll on people. This is their time to get a job and find themselves and then they’re moving back in with their parents,” she said.
Villareal said she was also concerned about how San Francisco’s budget shortfall - projected to be at least $1.7 billion over the next two years - would affect her job. Service cuts are expected, and city controller Ben Rosenfield warned May 13 that “extremely hard choices lie ahead.”
In the uncertainty, Villareal said she has been “trying to stay hopeful and trust God will lead me to where I should be in my life, even with the twists and turns going on - but it has been difficult. It doesn’t have all the things that make you feel like you’re in the next chapter of your life. You’re just stuck in a page.”
Nicolas Stevens, an SFSU senior and another member of the Newman Club there, will hand in his last assignment May 26, emailing it from his parents’ home in Mexico City.
“It’s definitely been a weird semester,” he said.
The change to online classes was jarring for him, removing much of the structure he counted on to do his work. “By not going to classes, by not having time set apart for going to school, it’s been hard to motivate myself,” he said.
Stevens said the pandemic has affected his friends through unemployment, moving in with parents, or losing social life at an age when it seems all-important, but he’s been struck by how people have been able to re-evaluate their lives in the enforced lull shelter-in-place brought.
For almost the first time, people are “no longer caught up in the middle, moving from one thing to the next without a pause. It has given them a chance to reflect and be introspective about what do I want to do with my life. This time of being stuck at home has definitely made a switch in people’s lives,” he said.
In June, Stevens will fly to Washington, D.C., to take up a year long volunteer position as an activities coordinator for Christ House, a nonprofit providing medical care for homeless people.
After that, he’s not concerned about what the future holds.
“I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. There are so many unknown variables, and it’s pretty apparent after the coronavirus that a lot of things can happen in a year,” he said.