In March, after I left Wellesley College when campuses were closed due to the coronavirus, I couldn’t sleep through the night.
I lost my appetite. I cried spontaneously. I was disappointed that the Class of 2020 wouldn’t get the graduation we deserved. But most of all, I was angry — at myself, for mourning the loss of my senior year. What right did I have to grieve when people were losing loved ones and jobs during the coronavirus crisis?
On Sunday, I didn’t walk across a stage to receive my diploma. I couldn’t hug my friends, thinking about how hard we’d worked in our politics seminars and biology labs to get here. I wasn’t able to shake hands with my professors, thanking them for fostering four years of intellectual growth. I knew these sacrifices were necessary, so I was ashamed that I couldn’t get over them.
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This wasn’t the first time I’ve been ashamed to feel my own pain. I’m the daughter of Chinese immigrants who never let me forget what they went through to give our family a better life. Our conversations about hardship are always pain competitions, rigged in my parents’ favor from the start.
My parents won the competition for racism. In second grade my classmates taunted me about eating meat that looked like worms, dumping my mom’s Chinese-style pork dish in the trash. When I came home crying, my dad dismissed the act. “In Texas in the ’80s, men would threaten to shoot me for invading their country,” he said. So last summer, when a man screamed a racial epithet and spat at me, I ignored him. It wasn’t like he’d pulled a gun on me.
My parents won the competition for health issues. When I told my mom I had anxiety, she replied that she had been anxious and poor at my age but still achieved academic and professional success. I shut up and soldiered on without seeking help.
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When I had to leave Wellesley, then, I didn’t feel I had the right to be sad. I hadn’t won the pain competition. My loss of graduation disappeared in the black hole of the virus’s wreckage, the gravity of the situation defined solely by death tolls and economic downturns. I told myself to get over it.
But I can’t.
And that’s OK. Pain isn’t a contest in which only the winners — those who’ve suffered the most — have a license to feel it and act on it. In the age of COVID-19, it’s OK to grieve about postponing weddings or nights out. It’s OK to mourn the loss of handshakes or conversations with strangers. We’re all losing rituals and traditions that are important to us. We’re allowed to feel the emotional loads of their absences without weighing them on a scale set by other losses.
To be sure, not all painful experiences are made equal. Immigrants undergo harrowing obstacles that their children have the privilege to never face. The COVID crisis has affected people differently based on their identities and socioeconomic status. But grief and compassion aren’t limited resources. We have the emotional complexity to mourn for other people’s losses without diminishing our own. We have the capacity to help ourselves while advocating for others.
I’m graduating from college during a week when the US death toll from COVID-19 exceeded 100,000. Millions more workers have lost their jobs. The economy continues to plummet. I am grieving for all of these things, but not the least for my graduation. Because it’s important to me. And it’s gone.
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Doris Li is a 2020 graduate of Wellesley College, having majored in political science and English.