It’s finals season, and that means it’s my favorite time of year: it’s time for seasonal depression! Every November I’ve been in college, I’ve crashed. Hard. The fatigue and workload just get to me, and my body decides to go catatonic for a month, which, as you may imagine, sucks shit for my grades.

But this year? I was turning things in on time, I was going to every class, I was brushing my teeth twice a day—

Then everything changed when the Johns Hopkins Medical Center nation attacked.

I’m the youngest person in my extended family by ten years. I have two cousins in their thirties and when we sit together it’s not the kids’ table—it’s the everyone under sixty table. I’ve always been the outlier—the youngest one, the mixed-race one, the one who is suspiciously queer, and, of course, the one who was a sad little chronically ill child. Now I’m a trying-not-to-be-sad tall chronically ill adult! Funny how time passes.

Being at UMBC has been a shift, because suddenly, I’m one of the older people in the room in most of my classes. Everyone I went to high school with has their bachelor’s and is off pursuing their future. Hell, almost everyone I know from my first attempt at college has graduated. Adulthood is upon me.

My mom turns sixty next month, and suddenly she acts like she’s dying. She told me where she wants us to spread her ashes, she asks me which life insurance plan she should pick, she makes me the executor of my parents’ will. She complains that she has prescriptions to pick up for herself now, because she’s old and she’s dying and to age is to suffer. 

Watching her go through these motions is giving me a headache. For years I’ve stood in line at Target to pick up my prescriptions, I’ve set aside half an hour every Sunday to watch youtube and cut tiny atenolol tablets in half and put them in a weekly organizer, I’ve had to limit the kinds of activities I do in fear that maybe I’ll just keel over. My mom has never been diagnosed with a chronic illness, has never even broken a bone, hikes two hours nearly every day and has seemingly limitless energy to worry about her impending demise.

We discussed in class how autism is seen as mainly affecting children, erasing the experience of autistic adults. I think chronic illness is seen to mainly affect people as they get older, as their weary bones start to creak with the constant toil of living. And then there’s me, and every other person living in the “prime” of their life with a funky little diagnosis. Sometimes I feel like I’ve already gone through some of the mental hoops that typically come with aging—I’ve gotten used to the doctor’s visits, to the sporadic pain, to the fear of looking weak, frail, disabled. Sure, maybe it all goes downhill from here. Maybe I’m at my own absolute prime and it’s where most people would be in their fifties, at least. Somehow that makes aging seem even less scary to me.