It’s 90°F and raining. I make the mistake of putting on a raincoat instead of taking my umbrella, and by the time I get to the office the fabric is clinging to my skin like plastic wrap. I resign myself to the fact that I will feel gross all day and that my hair will not return to an acceptable volume until October.
It’s July in North Carolina, of course. The campus is empty, the cafes close early, and the grad students take turns going on vacation. Without any events to bring us all together, the members of our cohort finally determine which three people they will hang out with on weekends and which they will simply say hi to in the hallways. I worry that, in true autistic fashion, I will gradually reduce my network to one person, whose personality I eventually assume as my own. I make an effort to maintain old friendships and start new ones, and to retain my identity—whatever that is. I search for myself in all the usual places: in long drives, in rock music, in books. I’d like to look in an unusual place, but I don’t know any. I confide to a friend that sometimes it feels like the only reason I do things is to tell other people about them.
The problem is that summer is so slow, it feels like falling asleep. We slip into a dreamlike state and cannot say anything about what the trees look like or what flowers we passed on our walk. Our mind wakes us only to what we need to know. Creativity, suddenly, becomes an effort. I recall how I felt this time last year, when everything was new; how I was awake to the smallest crack in the pavement, to the faintest bird song, to the most ordinary face. Loneliness sharpens us like nothing else, wakens us to the world around us and makes our identity strikingly clear against the backdrop of Everything Else.
There is nothing as slow as a college town in summer. We see only hints of conflict in the outside world: the Palestine flag painted on the free expression bridge, the Israel flags in my neighborhood and in some of the dorm windows. And some sarcastic mention of Project 2025. But the few faces on the bus are as expressionless as my own, the conversations at the student socials are as meaningless as ever, and sometimes the silence in the hallway is so sickening I want to scream. But I don’t scream, I don’t even speak, and perhaps that’s the problem. “I can lose my mind after I take my preliminary exam,” I tell myself, but perhaps it’s healthier to lose one’s mind little by little instead of all at once.
I used to fear change, but I’ve come to fear stagnation more. It’s unnatural. The uneasiness is a shared feeling: graduate students, more than anyone, are afraid of having too much time. They don’t think to fill it with life.