Uncertainty and loss of routine: One student’s journey through the pandemic
By Gillian Manning
Alone in his bed, the curtains are drawn and though it’s midday, no light makes it into the room.
It’s the summer of 2020, the world has shut itself away from the outside while a virus ravages communities. The weight and fear of the chaos beyond closed doors makes simple tasks like eating and showering feel impossible.
Jay Nixon, 20, is a student at the University of Florida studying educational science with a passion for theatre, and his experience with anxiety and depression during the COVID-19 pandemic is one that many young adults may relate to.
“I was really sad and really concerned for the world because I didn’t know what this was and what to do about it. So I just closed my curtains,” Nixon said.
Researchers from Boston University found that one-third of adults between the ages of 18 and 30 reported clinically elevated levels of depression, anxiety, and PTSD during the pandemic.
Nixon began teaching theatre at the Hippodrome Theater in his hometown Gainesville, Fla. at 16, but he first walked through the doors when he was seven years old.
“My mom got me into [the Hippodrome] because she kept saying I was too loud,” Nixon chuckled. “My mom was really desperate to put me somewhere because she was a single parent so childcare was really important for her. She needed to find a place that was stable and would impact my life in some way and she did, it impacted my life in a very strong way,” he said.
Nixon spent years going to classes and camps at the theater and first began as a volunteer camp counselor when he was 13. It was through theater that he began to realize who he truly was.
“I remember as a kid, dude, I was so messed up mentally and everything. My mom couldn’t afford for me to go to therapy and when I got older, I definitely needed it because my whole brain system was just botched, but theatre was a way for me to express some sort of emotion that I didn’t know was inside of me. And one of the things I was realizing for the first time was that maybe I’m not in the body that I’m supposed to be in,” Nixon said.
His theater classes often involved writing monologues, a longer speech spoken by one character in a performance. Nixon explained that he often found himself questioning if he was writing as a fictional male character or if he was writing as himself and later realized it was the latter.
Nixon teaches students between the ages of seven and 17, though works primarily with pre-teens. His students often return to the Hippodrome year after year and so were familiar with Nixon before he officially began his transition.
“When I told them, they took it and they basically said, ‘you’re still the same person who impacted my life, nothing is changing, I still love you,’” Nixon said.
Theatre taught him how to express himself and Nixon hopes that he can help teach kids the same thing.
“I see parts of myself in these pre-teens because a lot of them go through a lot of crap and they don’t know how to express that. That’s something a doctor can’t teach a kid, that’s something a lawyer can’t teach a kid. That’s just something theater can teach. It’s a way of expressing emotions, it’s a way of getting out what you need to say without getting in trouble for it,” Nixon said.
Nixon’s in-person classes shifted to virtual learning in March and he was let go from the Hippodrome in April 2020 due to the rapid spread of the coronavirus. He initially thought that he would be back in class within a week or two.
“That week turned into a month, and that month turned into five months, and that five months turned into a year,” he said.
Nixon experienced an onslaught of anxiety and depression. Due to the loss of his usual routine and his time at the Hippodrome, he spent the beginning of the pandemic in his room.
“We knew nothing. We knew to wear masks, we knew to socially distance, and that was pretty much it. The rest was just up to us to figure the fuck out,” Nixon said.
When he told himself that life would be okay, the lines coming out of the grocery store and the empty shelves told him otherwise. It was overwhelming. He felt unable to shower, eat, sleep, or drink and said that he drove himself literally sick as a result, having a cold for months.
For a moment, there was concern that his girlfriend had caught the coronavirus and while she ended up testing negative, the fear that someone dear to him could die was very surreal.
Since then he’s received an additional mental health diagnosis and has increased the doses of his medications to help combat his depression and anxiety. Despite his personal struggles throughout the pandemic, his concern is still for his students.
“The hardest part of the pandemic was watching my students suffer because they had no clue what was going on,” Nixon said.
He was elated to hear he was going to return to work at the Hippodrome for its summer camp in 2020 and took the opportunity to communicate with his group of students. They sat in a circle on the theater floor and he let them vent about whatever was on their mind. The kids discussed missing their friends and being disconnected from family.
“It hurts because as a human, you want to connect to people, as a human you want to help, you want to have compassion, and all I could do was have compassion. I couldn’t help them,” Nixon said.
During camp, Nixon worked with the kids to put on an entire theatrical production outside for their parents. Seeing the kids perform and the pride it gave their parents made it a moment Nixon said he would never forget.
In addition to outdoor performances, Nixon has also acted in digital theater productions over Zoom.
“That’s what’s really cool but the pandemic, it’s made us actually think outside the box of what we want to do in terms of theater and how we’re able to connect to an audience,” Nixon said.
Having made it through the worst of the pandemic in America, Nixon expressed gratitude for having survived thus far and hopes that others in his community continue to take precautions.
“If we just hang on, and just have that mindset of ‘it’s not about me’ then we can get through it,” he said. “We can do this, we can survive, we can live, we can love, we can move on.”
