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HJ: So it’s June 1, 2022. And I’m moving into a new apartment. The moving day is long and chaotic. But my roommate and I eventually get all of our stuff into the new place. And we start unpacking. And at some point, I sit down at the kitchen table to take a little break. And we’ve put our kitchen table under these big lovely windows in our kitchen. They have a nice view down onto the street, a nice view of the sky. There’s a bunch of natural light.
And so what I would like to be doing is enjoying this space that I’m in that I’m going to be spending at least the next year in. And instead, I find myself looking at the window, looking at the wall around it, and getting a little bit worried because it seems like there’s something wrong. The paint under the window is all like bubbled and discolored.
There’s a big crack stretching from one corner of the window, almost the whole length of the window, spiderwebbing out into the wall next to it. And there’s this other big section of drywall that’s like bulging and sagging. And it all looks really gross. And it looks like the window has probably been leaking, maybe for a while, based on the amount of damage here. And it hasn’t been fixed.
And going into this move I am at what I had hoped would be the end of a rough patch for me. I have been recovering for the last six months from a bike accident that left me with a broken collarbone and a concussion. And I’m trying to figure out how to grapple with my partner’s father’s recent diagnosis with cancer.
I have always thought of myself as a very resilient person. I think this is an identity that I really developed through doing competitive dance in high school, rowing in college, and it’s something I really held onto going into grad school at MIT. I knew it would be hard. But I can persist and I can endure, even if it’s difficult.
And I really held on to that belief about my resilience through this difficult period. And I was going through some hard stuff. But I was like, all right, I’m not going to let it bother me. I’m just going to keep moving. But I had kind of hoped that this move would put some distance between me and this stuff that I had been dealing with, give me a little bit of a break, let me start a new chapter.
And instead, I’m sitting here looking at this crack, all of this water damage in the wall. And I start feeling like my faith in my ability to be resilient and let this roll off my back is also starting to show some cracks. This really visible manifestation of something being wrong in my brain starts to intertwine with these other things that I’ve been carrying mentally and emotionally all together into what I think of now as an emergent anxiety that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
And I look at the crack in the wall. And the more I look at it, the more afraid I feel. Like, I’m scared. I’m looking at it. And I’m wondering, why is this here? Why hasn’t this been fixed? If it’s leaking, is there mold? Is it going to make me sick? If this is wrong, what else is wrong in this apartment?
What else do I need to be worried about? And also, how did I get myself into this situation? Because there must have been red flags. How could I have missed them? And am I not capable of finding a habitable apartment? I was really freaking out looking at this.
And to try to cope with this anxiety, I turned to a skill that I did still feel confident in, which is my ability to do research. I was like, OK. My landlord doesn’t fix this. What can I do? And I did a whole bunch of research. I learned a lot about tenants’ rights, landlords obligations, what my options were. I knew what steps I could take. I knew that I could ask the city to help me out if my apartment wasn’t up to code. But there was something that kept me from actually going ahead and doing it.
To admit that this situation was as bad as it was would mean that it was something that I couldn’t endure. And that really conflicted with this idea I had of myself as someone who was really resilient. And to cope with it, I kept doing research. And I did it while I was in lab trying to do work. And I did it while I was on the phone with my partner. And I did it before I went to sleep and right away when I woke up.
And when I wasn’t doing research, I was ruminating. I was worrying about it. It was like, the only thing in my head was thinking about possible solutions. And eventually, my roommate was like, I’ve had enough. We got to do something about this. That moment kind of gave me just enough permission to move forward with calling an inspector from the city to check out any possible housing code violations in our apartment.
This was exactly what I had been afraid of was admitting that this was something that I couldn’t endure. And more than that, this person might come in and basically tell me that I’ve been overreacting. What if there aren’t any housing code violations? What if I’m being too sensitive? And maybe I should be enduring it. So I was really scared. But we called the inspector. He came a few days later.
And the biggest thing that I remember was him looking at this crack in the wall and being like, yeah, your landlord’s got to fix this. We’ve got a housing code. Like, there are rules about this. And just the sense of relief that I felt on hearing that, that this person totally had our backs, agreed with us about all of the things we were worried about, and was going to help us. And he called our landlord and made her fix everything.
And the fixes weren’t perfect. And I didn’t feel 100% comfortable in the apartment. But I could go into the kitchen, sit down at the kitchen table without feeling this like twisting sense of anxiety and dread.
I’ve come to realize that my definition of resilience was maybe not serving me very well because some of the things I was dealing with I really did have to endure. I couldn’t do anything about them. But with my apartment, I could do something. I could make my situation better. And I didn’t need to endure it.
And so I still think of myself as a pretty resilient person. But I’m renegotiating my relationship with that identity to give more room for communication and acknowledging when things don’t seem right and my own well-being. And those skills are something that I hope to keep practicing and apply when I inevitably run into whatever challenges life is going to throw at me.
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