Cancelled fireworks, virtual avatars and protests: A tale of turning 25 on July 4th 2020
When I wrote about turning 20 5 years ago, I had no idea how every single aspect of that celebration would take a radically different form in just under 5 years.
Back then, I was interning at Facebook and celebrated by watching fireworks at Pier 39 with other interns from the Bay Area. We had a great time and I was just getting used to having the perk of my birthday always being an American holiday and having people hyped about it.
This year, after four months of mainly staying home in Boston with limited in person social contacts, many friends gone to their home state, and the few around reluctant to engage in any social activity, I felt pretty apathetic about celebrating anything.
I dreaded doing something and struggled to motivate myself. What’s the point of celebrating when the country is going through a pandemic with millions of cases, hundreds of thousand of people losing their lives, the highest unemployment rate recorded in recent decades and the biggest civil rights movements in recent history? 2020 being anticlimactic is an understatement.
As the date started to get closer, it became apparent that this perspective considered only the glass half empty with a pessimistic outlook.
Friendships are not just for moments when everything is going good in life and celebrating successes. Friends are even more valuable when encountering collective challenges and going through tough situations. Now, more than ever it was important to connect with my friends over the world and see how everyone was doing.
With that in mind, I was able to celebrate with friends from the US mostly outside Boston through a videoconference which ended up lasting 3.5 hours. A challenge I gave them was to create a short story inspired by our conversations and their creativity and accuracy blew my mind. This work stands among the best gifts I have received over the years. I am now dreading being part of many such committees over the years as some of them look for payback hahaha
After presenting the story with voice-overs, we moved to spending hours on gather.town with each of us having our mini characters and exploring the online world. It was interesting as the platform offered space to host many people while giving the freedom for each of us to have their own avatars and organically break out into smaller circles.
After catching up with US friends, I was able to have a call with my family members later in the day. It was amazing to reflect on the last 25 years as part of the family. The calls were of course disrupted by my nephews and nieces running around, taking the phone when greeting “Uncle Hassan”, singing “Happy birthday”. I am thankful to have them in my life.
After the family call, I got into a one hour call with friends from Abidjan. One of them described this gathering as one where he wouldn’t be surprised to see people he hadn’t seen since kindergarten. Most of them were either in France, Italy and Canada and sharing Covid stories and uncertainties about starting careers in uncertain economic times provided both relief and comfort to know that the struggles of these times are shared.
That call lasted longer than I expected and ,combined with the unreliable transport in Boston these days (spoiler alert: Lyft and Uber are basically not working), I found friends in Boston at Boston Commons.
In a classic manner, I arrived an hour late to my own birthday gathering and pulled a few tricks to appease the group. After seating (with masks and > 6 ft from each other) in the park and talking about how weird the year had been, we grabbed some food and ended up in the middle of a #SayHerName protest. It was an interesting coincidence as I originally picked the park as a gathering spot before knowing the day before that it would be the destination of a March. I thought it would be interesting to stay and be part of it as it felt like the appropriate way to celebrate July 4th this year.
In short, no fireworks this year as they were cancelled in Boston to respect social distancing measures but instead was able to connect with friends from across the world and reminding the nation to #SayHerName. As the rest of the year unfolds with many still momentous events still to happen, I am reminding myself to take it one day at a time and explore new dimensions of friendships in those crazy times.
Thank you !
