It’s nearly been a year since the pandemic transformed our daily lives here in London and the UK. If I’m being honest, sometimes it’s hard to remember what life was like before COVID-19. Maybe that sounds dramatic; after all, nearly our entire lives existed before all this started happening. But I don’t think it is. That’s what this crisis has done – it’s altered both our relationships and our understandings of time around us. It feels like it’s been ages since this started happening, but it also feels like time stopped in March 2020 at the same time, and that nothing has changed since then. So I feel like I’m living parallel lives, ones where both everything and nothing has changed. It’s difficult to process that, having to both carry on our daily lives while living in a time where nothing is the same. How do we even go about dealing with that?

I don’t have the answer for everyone, but I know that part of my answer is the wonderful LSE community that surrounds me. As an American living in the UK, sometimes I feel cut off or isolated from the broader society around me. Yes, there are loads of Americans and other non-British folks living in London, which of course helps. But sometimes it is easy to feel like you don’t belong because you don’t exactly understand what is happening around you.

However, LSE helps me deal with and manage that. LSE helps me grow through all this and thrive. I’ve now spent an equal amount of time connected to LSE that I was a Princeton University undergraduate. LSE is part of who I am and it’s part of my identity. It will be for the rest of my life, and for that, I am extremely grateful.

During this ongoing pandemic, LSE has provided me with a community and support system that has made the pandemic’s excruciating and mundane much more tolerable. I have amazing colleagues, mentors, students, and friends, all of whom help me power through the days, weeks, and months. They remind me why I’m doing this PhD and what I have to offer the world. They remind me that we can get through this and build a better world on the other side. They remind me I can and will make it. I don’t know when all this will end, but I know we’ll shoulder these burdens together. And together, we can do anything.