Where Will You Be in 5 Years?

I am sixteen years old, interviewing for a job making coffee at Tim Horton's. The small fast food coffee shop is filled with, what I would learn in On-Board Training were Arabica beans. Later on that smell would cling to me like my own sweat, seeping beyond my uniform and undershirt into my bras and skin. I'd throw my bra on the bed after work and try to find a clean one before school the next morning but no matter what detergent I used, they all smelled like Tim Horton's coffee. It felt like it took a year after quitting that job to get the smell of Arabica beans out of my hair.

At the interview, I don't know any of this yet, nor do I know it will be one of the most fun teams I will ever work with. At sixteen years old I don't know much of anything. The manager interviewing me is a lady that volunteered with the Girl Guides group I was in, back when I was in Brownies with her daughter, where we huddled under a lean-to we'd made and learned how to read a compass in the woods. Her daughter smiles pleasantly at me in a baker's uniform from the back. Her mother asks me what my five-year-plan is.

I tell her I want to go to university to become a teacher and one day, a writer. I talk about travel. I talk about all the things a sixteen-year-old girl wants to do with her life.

After university, at twenty-four, I didn't have a five-year-plan. Not exactly. I knew I still wanted to travel more. I knew I was enjoying my time in the Food and Beverage industry. I knew that I - somehow - liked being in customer service. My first draft of a manuscript - a collection of short stories and poetry - was complete and being edited to smithereens in my spare time. On social media, I devoted my off-hours to growing an Instagram following in preparation for the release of that collection of stories and made it up just past 1.6k followers. My boyfriend and I were living forty-five minutes away from each other, but that was OK because we had just started dating (even though we had known each other for years.) Plans to visit my long-time friend and former exchange student, C, in France were being made so I could finally meet her long-term boyfriend. I remember C telling me, "You have to meet him before he proposes!"

I turned twenty-four in January 2020.

I haven't lived through a moment that shook the world moreso than the global pandemic. Five years later and the ripples from the trauma, the fear, the lock-downs, and the virus itself are still felt today.

When I try to think about life before news of the global pandemic hit, I'm alarmed by how different a trajectory my life took on from the day of that first announcement. Each year, I read a few more people share their stories from that period and the months leading up to the lock-downs in March 2020. With passing time, it seems people are willing - or able - to share a bit more of their trauma and the dreams they grieved during this global shift. At the same time when I think about these past five years I'm alarmed by how blurry they feel, how much of a fever dream they are, and how quickly the time has gone by.

March 2020, at twenty-four years old, I had just finished my first season working as a server at a private golf club. In the months between finishing the last season and starting the next, I picked up a job as a waitress at my one-postal-code-town's local (and beloved) wing joint. It was a small, family-owned and family-oriented pub with Wednesday half-price wing nights and friendly regulars who hung out to chat or watch sports on one of the two giant TV screens above the bar. Only, sports games kept getting cancelled. Regulars complained to each other, "What the heck? Come on, this flu thing can't be that bad."

The first two weeks were filled with sports games getting cancelled. Then they were being replaced by News channels. Murmurings of the virus were ramping up. I asked the owner of the restaurant, "Do you think this is going to affect us?"

He waved me off and laughed. I still remember that laugh. He told me, "No way. Us? Out here? In the sticks? We'll be fine."

A week later the lock-downs were announced and we were organizing over texts who was available to work at the restaurant for take-out shifts. Three years later, the wing place would be closed and a new Irish pub would be in its place.

My manuscript felt silly in the face of so much political upheaval. I put it to the side and forgot about it.

Instagram was killed by TikTok and my will to create was killed by the depression I felt while in isolation (until I found Vocal in 2021.)

I didn't make it out to France. C got married.

And the world continued to turn and end at the same time.

Five years later and it feels like that's still the case. In fact, it feels like in 2020 the world started to really ramp up on the burning thing, and then just...never stopped. In the last five years, there has been little reprieve from political, social, and cultural upheaval from every corner of the world. And it's about to get even more dumpster fire-esque in 2025 in both the USA and Canada with extreme conservatism on the rise.

My mother is an elementary school teacher. It has been her dream job for twenty-two years. So much so, her passion for teaching inspired me to pursue a Concurrent Education degree after high school (although I never ended up following through with it. That was a year before the pandemic, though.) I had spent years growing up, spending hours in her classroom volunteering with the kids and staff. Everyone was excited to be there, other than the typical one or two kids who weren't. Those kids might be disruptive sure, but nothing some attention, time, parental and administrative support couldn't eventually help. Usually the disruptions weren't even that bad (maybe once every year or two there would be something really "shock" worthy) - they were just behaviors that weren't beneficial to the kid or kind to their peers. What used to just be seen as "normal" kid stuff.

Five years ago, my mother told me about strangers infiltrating Zoom classes.

Four years ago, my mother told me about grade 7 and 8 kids kicking in bathroom stall doors and smearing feces on the walls.

Three years ago, my mother told me about a grade four student pulling a gun out during a zoom class.

Two years ago, my mother told me about a grade two child who couldn't stop herself from masturbating in class.

Last year my mother told me about a grade one child who kept running off the school property, into local traffic, in an attempt to kill himself.

This year my mother has decided to retire early.

In 2022 there were reports of there being a 59% increase compared to pre-pandemic of Ontario youth administration to in-patient mental health facilities for disordered eating. A condition that research has shown can often be the subconscious or conscious response to feelings of lacking control when the patient is experiencing circumstances or feelings that are out of their hands at that time. Is it any wonder that during a time of upheaval, where none of the adults in their lives had the answers as to what was going on at the time, that kids and their brains would search for some semblance of order, even if in harmful illusions perpetrated by social media?

During the rise of Andrew Tate a year or two back, my mother would tell me of young boys telling their teachers they didn't have to listen to them, because the teacher was a woman.

"Conspiracy theories" are no longer curious whispers in the shadows, but spill like facts from the mouths of babes.

When you ask kids what they want to be when they grow up they say, "rich," "famous," or "not dead."

During the pandemic, I remember reading somewhere that how the virus manifested in schools was a reflection of how the virus was manifesting in the community, since schools are often a microcosm of the society they are a result of. I sometimes wonder if something similar can be said for the mental health of children in schools and what it implies about the mental health of our times.

Had I been a Brownie during the pandemic, would I have gotten the chance to huddle under a lean-to with three other girls in the rain? Had I been a sixteen-year-old during the pandemic would I have had the chance to work at Tim Horton's in close quarters with such great people? Would I have wanted or been allowed to by my parents? What would my answer have been as a teenager during lock-downs to "what is your five-year-plan?"

I genuinely don't know. All I know is that I feel for these kids.

Yet we still clock into our daily routines. We wake up every day and try to make the most of it. We expect 18 and 19-year-olds to clock into the mundane and pressurized life of adulthood, even though they missed out on many of the experiences we had as kids growing up to the pandemic; even with threats of war, where their demographic will likely be the one to fight for the adults who failed them, if it happens. We expect these kids to follow the status quo, to act like nothing ever happened, to ask for permission to use the bathroom. It's all we know to do.

The forced cognitive dissonance is driving people of all ages to the brink of madness.

Somehow it feels like everything and nothing has changed since the five years the global pandemic was announced. Even the American president is the same again (mind boggling, for the record)...but the world has irrevocably changed.

There is really no one article or text book chapter that will ever be able to encompass the depth of what or who has been lost during this time. I don't think there will ever be a listicle that could state every change that has happened as a direct result of the global pandemic in 2020. There is only the attempt to collect these individual strings, stories, and experiences as people heal and share them. We can only try to weave these stories into a greater fabric, a banner that cannot be forgotten, and march on.

In 2025, at twenty-nine years old, I'm scared to make a five-year-plan. As we've seen, so much can change in five years. Still, I write Vision Board Poems and journal dreams of manifestation. I talk to my friends and make plans for the weekend. I apply for jobs and set up interviews. I listen to other's stories. I offer them a place by the fire made from the rubble of the last five years. I write and I hope that one day, all of these little actions and moments will contribute to a world that feels more like home.