9x9x25

Anxiety.

I have it.

Last Monday, I called out of work and had to cancel class because I caught some kind of weird stomach flu. This is what comes to mind:

If you know your body well enough, you know when the illness you've gotten is simply your body's way of saying, "Slow down. We need to take some time." I'm fairly certain this is what happened, and this is also that moment when you as a person who wonders if you feel normal says to yourself, "Maybe it's just in my head. I need to reject these feelings, push through, and I'll be fine."

But then that validating moment happens when one of your peers says, "How are you feeling?" and after a bit of a back-and-forth, you realize that you both had the same symptoms: dizziness, light-headedness, stomach cramping. (Usually right about here is where a polite person declines to provide more details about their illness.) "Oh," you think to yourself, "it's not in my head after all."

And --you've been here-- the second you realize that being sick isn't in your head, the floodgates of permission open and now because you think you're somehow more "allowed" to feel sick, you start paying attention to your symptoms in a cataloguing way that formulates a balance sheet of whether these feelings justify whether you can call out or not. You make the replacement lesson plans, you email all of the necessary people, your administrative assistant puts the "Class Cancelled" notice on the door, you email your students in a mass email, you feel the heart-wrenching reality of being deducted pay for being sick, and as you fall back on the couch you tell yourself that it's worth it to pay to be sick.

This is my question: is this kind of stomach flu passed along with bacteria so advanced that it knowingly seeks out teachers only? Because based on the conversations I've had around campus since then, only teachers seem to have been plagued by this particular virus. And here's another question: should we change our Web-MD description of the stomach flu to match work-based stress and anxiety? Because the similarities are suspicious.

It seems only teachers get this illness, teachers who are "over-worked and under-paid", teachers who always tell young, fledgling teachers that "your students should always be working harder than you are" --okay, if that's true, than how come it's only the teachers getting the anxious flu? Going one step further in seeing the world through a creative writer's lens, this is the stuff theme is made of. The creative writer in me pictures an allegory where only teachers get a certain kind of illness, a story not altogether different from Blindness by Jose Saramago (if you haven't read it, you need to) where there will be one noble person with the answer and thus change the fate of society as we know it. This is a writeable allegory, and in it I could tell a new version of the oft-told tale...

...or maybe I'll have to do that later. I have a lot of catch-up I have to do from calling out sick.