In the summer after second year, I was packing a rucksack to travel to Bolivia, where I would start my year abroad. As I replaced grammar textbooks with mosquito repellent and a formal gown with hiking gear, quiet fear began. I would miss out on so much. Grand events like formals and balls; strange ones like sticky nights out and unexpected detours with my friends; the everyday familiarity of the library and the buttery. In a panic, I wrote down a list of May Balls I would save up for and kept the piece of paper in my notebook throughout my time in South America and France. In the end, however, I didn’t even buy a ticket to a garden party. By the end of the year the golden grip of Cambridge had loosened, as I let new sources of life reach in.

To me it has often seemed impossible that Cambridge could ever fall apart, it seems so powerful. So much of it is wonderful: the first sip of champagne at Matriculation Dinner, walking through a medieval courtyard at night, supervisions that stun with possibility. In my attempt to seize the promise of this apparent wonderland, I tried to do it all: formal halls, May Week, Cindies, the Union, parties, 12-hour workdays, new friends, new perspectives – you name it.  Now coronavirus has pierced this scene, and the glass of the globe has shattered. And with this disruption those golden, seemingly unshakeable traditions have slipped away.

“To me it has often seemed impossible that Cambridge could ever fall apart”

For those of us who have returned to Cambridge this year, it has been a new experience in an ancient place. The unnatural tranquillity of quiet streets in Michaelmas Term made me feel as though I was a witness to my life as if in a snow globe – shaken and trapped.

Such enforced stillness led me to reflect on my time so far in Cambridge. As a fourth year, I wish I’d stepped beyond the sphere of Cambridge, in order to examine it better myself; I wish I had revived myself from the stupor of wonder in this bizarre place. In doing so, I could have tuned in to what I wanted, could have said no as often as I said yes, could have had the courage to have explored creative, unpredictable pursuits (like getting more involved in comedy shows) as much as others more useful to a career (like student journalism). Cambridge offers you so many opportunities, and I felt I had to seize them all. Half-blinded by the splendour of the university, I was always seeking some unwinnable formula to life, as if making some exacting series of decisions would yield the path to this abstract, golden life, ever just beyond my grasp. Looking back, this way of living just made me anxious and exhausted.

“If I could have taken time to work out how my values could have connected with my real life, rather than some distorted, imaginary fantasy of Cambridge, my time as a fresher would have been much less exhausting”

Tentatively I am re-imagining this awful year from the perspective of the upheaval of the Year Abroad, it has given me a space beyond the relentless demands of Cambridge, to explore what I really want to do, whether it is representative of some chimeric completion of life or not. I remember how I feared that I would miss out if I didn’t complete the bucket list; that I wouldn’t have friends if I didn’t go to every social event; that I wouldn’t get a job if I didn’t take part in every society. And then the Year Abroad came around, and then the pandemic, and I ended up without my friends, without familiarity, without the illusion of control, and found that living without this utopian thinking was just fine anyway.

In an article for the New York Times, philosopher Alain de Boton writes that the ongoing pandemic reveals the inherent instability of living: “Being alive always was and will always remain an emergency; it is truly an inescapable ‘underlying condition.’” For example, when I tried to plan for May Week a year in advance, it was an attempt to impose certainty over the hazy, unsettled time of the Year Abroad.

As a Fresher, I looked to all other people but myself to work out what to do, searching desperately for some correct code for living, but I think I already knew what I liked and what I wanted to do. If I could have taken the time to work out how my values could have connected with my real life, rather than some distorted, imaginary fantasy of Cambridge, my time as a fresher would have been much less exhausting. Only my year abroad made me realise that life doesn’t end (or even begin, necessarily) when you start at Cambridge: all the space for living well is already within us. This knowledge has helped me this year to survive in this weird place and in this weird time.

My advice for new freshers is to take risks – if you want to. Be bold and creative – if you want to. Find any activity that will allow you to sit with yourself and listen to what you like. This may help you to resist the feeling that there can or should be a perfect way of living, something I’m still trying to remember day-to-day. Try to find out what you really like, and then do it, without the fantasy of the castle in the sky.