Keeping Friendships Strong during the Pandemic

Hi everyone! I’m Lauren Lopez and I want to start off by saying I hope everyone reading this is staying healthy and safe with everything going on in the world right now. One thing I noticed lately is that my relationships with people have seemed to change a bit during this crazy time, but not in a bad way at all! To give you some background, I am an out of state student from New Jersey and when it came to picking a college, I was the odd one out of my friend group. Most of my friends from home stayed along the east coast, while I went pretty far from home. I remained close with them, but things got busy at school and I didn’t get to see my best friend almost every day like I did before coming to Purdue. The same goes for my extended family. I no longer was able to see them on some special occasions because I was in Indiana and they were all in New Jersey.

Now that everyone is staying at home, I find myself reaching out to more people than before. Every week my family has a group call that I try to join and hear the weekly updates from everyone. Even some relatives who live a little farther away come on the calls, when before they couldn’t make it to all the family gatherings. When it comes to friends, it has been amazing how creative we can be to still be there for each other even when we’re not able to be with each other in person. Just yesterday my friends and I followed the new trend to make signs and drive to our other friend’s house to celebrate her birthday from our cars. It made us all happy and I think that that is something that is so important with a lot of negativity surrounding the current issue. Moreover, I received a sweet letter in the mail from a sister yesterday, too! This put a big smile on my face, and it was so unexpected. I’ve also been sending and receiving kind messages to/from other sisters just to say hello and see how everyone is doing. It is so great how everyone is keeping the sisterhood strong even while we’re all in different locations. I hope that this reminds everyone that even in tough times, there are so many ways to bring positivity and kindness to others, like my time at home has reminded me.