I’ve always grown up somewhere hot. Every summer, the heat would climb until the swamp cooler’s effectiveness would be diminished by physics itself.
I don’t tan like my siblings or my grandparents, not as much. My grandparents both had and have beautiful, wrinkled tanned skin from years of outdoor work, spending their time outside. They used to talk about the garden they had, or the days they would hike canyons. I remember my grandmother taking me out to the desert a lot when I was younger, and sometimes she’d remember to slather me in sunblock, but I think I found my appreciation for the outdoors, regardless of the heat, because of the vast open space the rocks, cliffs, and dunes offered me then.
I have some distinct high heat memories, like the summer before my freshman year, when I surprised by family by also joining the marching band. Though I had covered myself in sunscreen, though my grandpa warned me to wear long sleeves instead (a sensible, logical, and effective way to protect your skin from the sun); I came home with my skin covered in reddish amber, and shoulders covered in blisters everywhere where my tank top straps could not protect. I distinctly remember the process of pain I went through during my first band camp, largely because for the most part, I was the only one to be trained in my position; the longer I worked, the more I embraced the pain, dealing with the blisters and accepting the friction as my arms and flag glided through the air and around my body. For me, heat meant pain, and heat meant action.
Another one of these memories was the move in process going into my freshman year of college. Down several family members compared to those summer days four years ago, it was understandable that my (grand)dad could not help me with the extensive move. I got help from a local friend I haven’t talked to in a long time, with the two of us laying out, appreciative of the broken AC that sent out air much cooler than it was supposed to. It was 113 degrees outside that day, and by the end I was shuddering and dripping with sweat, but it was the most free I had felt in months. I opened my blinds in the room I would be staying in, and accepted the sun in full.
I’m reflecting on heat, specially overheating, because of my ongoing illnesses and exhaustion. Where I am now, we were lucky to get a bit of cold in the early winter, and rain at the start of the year to reasonably drop the temp a bit, but this place, every part of it, isn’t exactly designed for safety in mind.
I’ve been feeling guilt about a particular issue I’ve been having. I got quite comfortable in environments by myself. Furthermore, I suspect that, in terms of my academics, a part of my unease in many of my classrooms is related to a lot of torment and harassment. When you are picked at and fucked with in a contained space, it turns you into something tense and always aware. Before I was on my recent medication, and while I was younger, I was often the one separated from the classroom, by choice, or by force because of my discomfort, instability, and outbursts. Sitting in a classroom desk, I feel myself get hotter and hotter, unable to focus on instruction. Every sound, noise, cough, squeak and scratch makes my skin crawl. If I get touched. I panic.
This was me in childhood. I recognize the patterns I took to keep myself stable in those environments, removing myself, extracurriculars that kept me out of the traditional classroom, the lunches I spent hiding. Those were sensible coping mechanisms I manipulated and begged for to my teachers and peers, and because I was a child who could not receive mental health support, that was the best they could do for me.
So I find myself in college now, and I thought I’d have far more control over my stability within my existence and education.
This was, unfortunately, an ill planned thought.
When local cases of COVID-19 were located in my county, soon things shut down, my grades were okay enough for the most part as a senior in largely supplemental classes that I didn’t need to do much, and my college registration, instead of being a grueling trip for an elderly man and his disabled kid, was a simple few hours of online, direct communication and getting my classes situated.
Even though I was physically on campus in 2020, the campus was a dead zone. I lived alone at the end of my hall, and I loved it. My requirements for the day that saw me out in public were the essential matters, and my job. This was arguably the semester I had the best attendance in my entire academic career, following the intensification of my symptoms beginning in my sophomore year of high school. Whenever I go back to my camera roll from that time, around March 2020 to May 2021, I see a person who’s entirely different from the person writing this, even though for the most part we’re the same. He was on testosterone, seeing changes, taking classes he enjoyed, spending time alone.
I differed in the summer of 2022, I don’t need to talk much about the in between time, because it’s a period I’m still examining for my own wellness, issues, and trauma.
I’m writing now, I am on testosterone, but I am not seeing changes other than the way I sweat and getting dizzy in the heat. Not only that, but I’m taking classes I am far more passionate about, but struggle to attend consistently, and instead of enjoying my time alone, I am fucking desperate for it.
There’s at least several things I could pinpoint. I mentioned before my anxiety and unease in physical classrooms full of people, though I think this is only a part of the problem. COVID-19 isolation was such a vital part of keeping my family safe due to a number of reasons, I continue to keep myself as educated as I can on the ongoing pandemic concerns due to my months of reporting local, county, and reservation case and death numbers. Once I started having in person classes, mask mandates did exist at first, but that did not solve the classrooms with horrible ventilation and heating. In numerous classes, since returning, I have sat, unfocused, vibrating, trying desperately to not vomit back into my mask.
Any precautions my university once had for respiratory illnesses and infections is now gone. I have and continue to wear my masks. I have classes in a small window of time to accommodate for my mobility and my transportation schedule. Likewise, I changed my degree, so I wouldn’t be forced into classes with attendance policies so strict you’d have to hope someone in the class had gotten seriously ill and drop out in order to get off the wait list.
I’m not succeeding. The classes I sit in, their ventilation is worse, unless you’re able to maybe open a window. There is no restraint on disgusting behavior, getting coughed on out in the open from behind because no one covers their mouth anymore. Coming into a room, being the only one in a mask, where it’s already presumed I’m a student who’s sick and troublesome because of my accommodations submitted from the DRC two weeks in and the click of my cane (or eventually, I suspect soon, my walker.) I’m a student who will sit in your in person class praying the entire time I don’t catch a respiratory virus, or measles. While my professor lectures, I’m doing the math on the safest time to take my migraine medication, since I’m not sure the seed pain has grown enough yet for me to “justify” it.
I get stars in my vision, blinking hazy spots surrounded by blackish gray haze. There is a distinct tingle to the body, where you can feel the chill of your own sweat and electric stings firing off your nerves, my breath gets heavy, long, and slow.
I had to leave class again, and I’m skipping my second one too. I’ll go back to my job in a few hours, where the airflow, and the occasional ability to take a break outside, will keep me going till closing.
I want to be seen as a good student, as a good person. It’s not terror anymore, I haven’t felt driven by terror in a long time. I feel deliberately distant, like the exact kind of student the advisors and mentors and professors and administrators identity as lazy, uncaring, and wasting everyone’s time.
I think the way universities and schools often treat their students as a part of larger money making systems, and the way it is encouraged to dehumanize the student so that the most efficient teaching and grading can take place. Receiving an education, regardless of whether it’s post secondary education or vocational focused, still feels like my only way out, even though the demands of labor in this country continue to shrink in favor of capitalist gain at the cost of the people who commit the labor. Because I am not, and never will be, an optimal student for the system I’m in, and other systems I look at with a lot of melancholy, my ill-preparedness for the future is just more point of pain, stress, and obsession for me.
I want to love being in a classroom, I want to love school and the work I do. Instead, all I feel is heat. I feel invisible blisters and wounds in the places old scars lay, unstable hands taking minutes to type what takes an instant to come to my mind.
I am burning, and I am begging to be put out.