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The first time I took a Myers-Briggs personality test, I was in Mrs. Rabinowitz’s ninth grade class. I was apparently an ESFJ — the Consul — but I didn’t really know what most of the letters meant.

I did know one letter. The one that made sense.

E. For extrovert.

One letter, one word that has defined me as well as any other for my 22-year existence. A major reason I love journalism, and part of why I have loved almost all of my college experience at Syracuse. Meeting new people, hearing their stories and building connections with them makes me happier than almost anything on earth. Sitting in Newhouse’s Food.com, accomplishing nothing for hours but sparking conversations with peers is time well spent for me. Making friends as a freshman, meeting new people in London when I studied abroad — that was all easy.

What happened next was much harder. I sat in the Doggett’s Coat and Badge pub in London drinking a pint of Peroni and read about COVID-19 in the London Evening Standard on a Wednesday night last February. That’s when I first realized what might happen next to the world, and how a looming potential lockdown could affect my own mental health. It ended up worse than I even imagined.

Mental health is perhaps the most underdiscussed, unintended consequence of COVID-19.

Life as an extreme extrovert in a global pandemic has had a devastating effect on my mental health — as a person known for smiling on the rec basketball courts at Spring-Ford (Pa.) High School even if I was playing poorly like usual and my team was losing. The last 14 months have been a suffocation of the social interactions I rely on for natural caffeine and energy. The dramatic juxtaposition of London Anthony, the happiest I’ve ever been, to COVID-19 Anthony, is stark. I’m at my happiest when I’m a social butterfly at a gathering. My friends often make fun of me for being all over the place or trying to say hello to everyone I know. I bounce between friend groups for better or worse because that’s part of what extroverts do. We’re replenished by social and human interactions and have a sinking fear of too much alone time in our own thoughts.

Maintaining relationships entirely through technology is absolutely exhausting, though. And face-to-face interactions can never be replicated through that technology. I went months without going to visit my dad after returning from London. Because of his high-risk profile, I feared that going to visit him was too big of a risk. There weren’t sports, and I didn’t even miss them.

I filled my time during COVID-19 like everyone else my age. Too much time on social media. Late nights playing Call of Duty really poorly. Zoom happy hours with friends that I had done real happy hours with two months earlier. I read a few books at first but then gave up. This wasn’t what 2020 was supposed to be.

When I turned 21 on December 17, 2019, I thought a lot about what 2020 would look like. The best year of my life: a chance to go abroad, a chance to maybe land a summer internship (probably not) and then a chance to cover Syracuse football and men’s basketball while spending one final year with the friends I had only so recently met, yet considered friends for life. In London, I felt like an adult for the first time in my life. The circumstances forced me to make new friends, the same circumstances that left me carefree about my future. By March 12, when I arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport to board the plane to Philadelphia instead of Poland, I smiled reminiscing on the best two months of my life. I sipped a Corona at the airport because I am incredibly corny.

When I turned 22 on December 17, 2020, I had looked forward to meeting up with friends from home to celebrate. I woke up to the remnants of a snowstorm — an event that pre-pandemic Anthony would have absolutely dreamed of on his birthday. Pre-pandemic Anthony would have gone outside to enjoy the snow and found a way to see his friends. Instead, I barely left the couch at home. Just another day in the same mold of so many before it.

I haven’t done nearly enough smiling in the last 14 months. The quarantine at home, which began with lots of family Netflix, card games and board games slowly devolved into more time spent in my room, isolated. Desperate attempts to maintain friendships of people I had not seen, and could not see for months, left me glued to my phone.

I dreaded Apple’s weekly screen time report, a constant crushing reminder of how much time I spend on my phone trying to maintain friendships or scroll through Twitter. I’d be lying if I didn’t say there were bright spots. My time playing clown ball — a modified baseball game that is far too complicated to explain in this space — helped me meet dozens of new people and gave me something to look forward to most days in the summer. I rekindled my love of tennis and tried to play with friends as much as I could.

Returning to school, I thought, would cure my issues. Many extroverts like myself thrive off the random encounter with an acquaintance. The person you see every so often. You’re not close friends, but you always have one or two things in common that become topics of conversation when you bump into them in public. That is college, in so many ways.

After one walk down the promenade at Syracuse this fall on the second day of classes, I sat down on the big patch of grass in between Newhouse and Maxwell and began tearing up. Almost no one was there. One friend remarked that coming to college felt a whole lot more like a job than school. Masks made it difficult to recognize people around campus. The Syracuse I had known for my first five semesters of college was gone, and I knew then I’d never see it again as a student in my final two.

Schoolwork became impossible to focus on. My beloved roommates, closest friends and family were mostly unaware of my struggles. To those who I did confide in, I am endlessly thankful for all of your help and advice. You know who you are. Late night Dabbundo became one of my nicknames for my often late-night emails at this newspaper as a freshman, but it also became the hours of many late night texts and FaceTimes with people who helped me the most through this during the worst of it.

As I always do, I put on my happy smile on the outside that I almost always walk around with. But on the inside, hours in my apartment became days. In-person classes were the rare reprieve, but even those became more like a chore than a reward. The things of my senior year I had expected — traveling to cover sports, nights out with my friends and social interactions everywhere — were over. Everything that had made the first three years of college special was supposed to culminate in one final year, one last dance. Instead of a dance, the music stopped.

The low point came in early December after returning home in late November didn’t help me feel better. I desperately searched for ways to improve my mental health. Some people can go for long walks by themselves and play music or listen to podcasts. That’s not really me. In January, once our spring semester was pushed back to February, I hit the road.

The first trip was to Syracuse to cover two games. I barely left my apartment except when I absolutely had to. Not good. The next two weekends, I drove to Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C., to stay with friends and cover Syracuse basketball.

Seeing friends I hadn’t seen in months helped me snap out of the funk. Reconnecting with old friends from home and abroad in person instead of through phone screens made a huge difference. When this newspaper cleared us to travel to cover the ACC Tournament and NCAA Tournament, that meant a chance to meet people and be around others.

I walked into a bar in Indianapolis the Monday after Syracuse booked its spot in the Sweet 16 with the goal of grabbing a quick lunch and leaving to do some schoolwork after. I met a guy from New Jersey who’d just watched Rutgers lose in heartbreaking fashion the night before. A local electrician who wanted to talk about Carson Wentz coming to Indianapolis. Two guys from Virginia who had come to watch VCU play, only for their game to be canceled. A 30-minute lunch turned into a two-hour conversation. Dennis, a VCU fan, graciously offered me his ticket that he couldn’t use anymore to join his friend David, also a VCU fan, at a Michigan-LSU second round game that night.

When I sat down in Lucas Oil Stadium, the moment hit me. It was the first time I’d attended a sporting event as a fan in more than a year. Indianapolis felt like a return to normalcy. I talked for two hours with David that night. A year ago, I’d gone to Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and made friends with John from Norwich. It felt right that my return to sports would come this way. The buzz of the crowd had me engaged in a game where the outcome didn’t matter to me. Meeting random people you’ll probably never see again. But it’s the belief that maybe you’ve made a new friend that keeps me going. These are all things that an extrovert lives for. Am I weird? Absolutely. Am I crazy? Probably.

At a different restaurant in Indianapolis that week, I injected myself into a conversation I’d overheard strangers having at the table behind us.

When a friend asked me why, I told him that it’s who I am.

And it’s who I will always be, for better or worse.

— 30 —

Anthony Dabbundo was a senior staff writer at The Daily Orange, where his column will no longer appear. He can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @AnthonyDabbundo.

Published on May 13, 2021 at 1:29 am