At the time of me writing this blog, I have the freshman plague.
Before coming to Duke, the freshman plague was this ominous illness that could strike anyone at any time, like something out of a Hollywood movie. Sure, the reasons it was so prevalent were clear (new people living together in close quarters) and it was relatively benign (evident in the fact that so many people with the plague still manage to drag themselves to my chem lecture every week), but that didn’t remove the aura of unpredictability around it. At first, the symptoms were unknown; I remember asking my RA at brunch if the stomach flu went around a lot. Its cause was never specified – no one could say whether it was a bacteria, a virus, or something else – and obviously, with a name that’s reminiscent of the bubonic plague, this disease must be sneaky, contagious, and of course, dangerous.
But it’s not dangerous. I know, because this is my second time having the plague, which implies that I probably lived through the first time.
The freshman plague is usually not identified as any other communicable disease. It’s not pink eye, the flu, or anything else that already has its own name. It’s a cough of unknown origin, sometimes accompanied by a sore throat. It comes with at least one of your family members asking on the phone if you’re getting sick. Even if you have allergies or endemic sniffles, you typically notice the freshman plague as a departure from your usual state of being. Based on my last bout with the plague, it should take about a week for me to recover. Some people have been sick since O-week. It doesn’t seem to majorly impair most people, but it can. The ambiguity of the plague is what gives it its notoriety.
But of course, something so ambiguous is rather fitting for the first year of college; most people are still trying to determine what trajectory they want their lives to follow, and as a result, the stress wears down their bodies and makes them more susceptible to illness. It’s science.
So while we may have the plague all figured out, we don’t have everything else figured out, and that’s fine. There’s no need to pathologize uncertainty when it’s the one thing that’s certain.