This weekend I found myself celebrating the last Halloween of my college career and I don't know what was scarier: swine flu or the prospect of (not) finding a job. I receive e-mails nearly every day concerning both of them: from Tufts, from my mom, from my friends — all admonishing me to wash my hands, buy a suit, avoid sharing drinks and network. My everyday conversations are suddenly peppered with news of which fortunate souls have been recruited, and which unfortunate ones have come down with the infamous H1N1, as well as who took the LSATs out of sheer desperation and who has the vague and mysterious "ILI." It seems no one is safe. Why? Unemployment might not be as contagious as the dreaded swine, but sensationalism definitely is, and I see it infecting Tufts.
I work at an OCD clinic, where people with obsessions and subsequently, compulsive behavior (rituals) go to regain control, escape constant fear and recover their peace of mind. I spend my days convincing people that touching doorknobs and then not washing their hands before lunch will not, in fact, kill them. Try telling this to my roommates, who, thanks to Tufts' helpful reminders that they have zero new information for us but want to let us know that it is still possible we will all get the swine flu and die, have succumbed to the very OCD symptoms I try to eliminate in patients: excessive hand washing, undue fear of sniffly people, and the superfluous rule of 12. This rule consists of the (dubious) conviction that contamination can be transferred up to 12 times and still be dangerous, and I have seen it in action: shoes touch the floor and then a chair which touches pants which touch the couch which touches a face and BAM. That's only five — you're definitely done for.
The terrifying notions of "our future" and "next year" are little different. We obsess over jobs and applications and networking sites. (Hello? Just last semester you were using those to post black-out pictures of your friends with Sharpie on their faces.) We ritualize our quest for a livelihood after college, checking and rechecking, displaying shocking levels of perfectionism, scrupulosity and self-doubt. We spend hours a day on these things in an attempt to extinguish our perpetual anxiety over the possibility of joblessness, but the fear remains. We just can't handle the uncertainty. This is textbook OCD.
I'm not saying our entire campus has a clinical psychiatric diagnosis — this campus is home to approximately 36,829,457 active student organizations. I'm pretty sure most of us are more than functional. We study, we leave the house, we have friends, we feed ourselves. We'll be OK. This notion, however, is actually what I think we need to internalize even more as a campus — We. Will. Be. OK. The terrain of our future, and apparently, our health, looks pretty rugged from here; we have suddenly found ourselves without the vaccines and foresight that have always served us so well. Finding a job might be hard. So might be finding a passion or a place to live (especially if you have swine flu). But we chose a major, chose a college, figured out how to pay for it and how to survive it — we will do this, and something tells me we will do it well.
In the meantime, I think the present state of everyone's lives might be improved if we just relax. Read the e-mails if you must; explore your options for next year and perhaps stick to your own Solo-cup for the rest of the semester. Wash your hands and clean up your resume. Do what you have to do, but don't fret! This is not scary. "Paranormal Activity" was scary. This is exciting! Things have a way of working out, and if they don't, then you were probably just destined for failure. Kidding! But seriously, take my word on this one: everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.
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Jessie Borkan is a senior majoring in psychology. She can be reached at Jessie.Borkan@tufts.edu
