The days before my first day at college were slowly fading away, and I was losing my hair. I hadn’t noticed, at first, because it had been so thick, covering my back like a quilt and causing my neck to sweat when my hair was down and I was dancing -- but I kept it down anyway because it glistened and flowed when I turned my head and strangers’ eyes went to my hair before drifting down to my face and my body as the music flowed through me and my hair. When I piled it on my head in a knot it was like a hat that covered my whole head and then reached out in crazy waves and curls that framed my face and could not be tamed.

Then the summer before college, after working on the farm when I started getting more and more tired, I would get home and shower and mixed among the fresh dirt streaming down my legs was long brown hair, covering the white plexiglass tub and streaming down the tiles and clogging the drain. I would pull out the hair, and then it would clog again and again and again. And when I held a wet wad of hair in my palm with first comprehension, something inside of me lurched and broke and tremors wracked my weakening body. I gasped and coughed as I inhaled the hot water and the lukewarm tears pouring down my face. By this point the chronic fatigue became evident, the fungal infections had started, and so did my life of going to one doctor to the next doctor, and from one medication to the next medication on and on. I was getting no where and learning nothing, except that there was nothing in the world that I could trust, least of all my body.

I thought of myself as broken when I entered Dartmouth in September of 2014. Physical limitations aside, I struggled to define myself. To fit in at Dartmouth, I had the impression that I needed to study intensely during the day and party intensely at night. I couldn't do either without serious repercussions. I tried to buy in as my friends gossiped about "this frat" or "that guy." My perceived importance of going out and hooking up only added to my panic about losing my hair. I grew resentful when my friends attempted to comfort me by telling me that I "didn't look sick," that "know one else knows."

My story has no easy answers. It does not culminate in a diagnosis. It does not readily translate into tidy advice I can send you from my computer screen to yours. It does not cleanly reflect the experience of others dealing with chronic illness at college or elsewhere. There is no unified experience of suffering. But, my suffering has opened the doors for me to notice others' suffering.

There is a whole lot of suffering at Dartmouth. There is a whole lot of suffering in the world. And you cannot compare suffering. Suffering is not quantifiable. It is not neat. It is not cute. You can learn from it, but you can also lose from it. And it is easier to lose from it. It is easier to push people away who want to help you but say the wrong things. It is easy to forget that they don't know the right things to say. It is easy to be alone in your misery. It is easy to become cynical. I learned to cope with my illness with mindfulness practice. Meditation helps me understand relativity, to see that there is no "Dartmouth student" mold that I need to fit into, that my hair does not define me. Nothing about my illness defines me.

Mindfulness practice, however, does not just give me the tools to exist peacefully with my illness. As I grew increasingly aware of different types of suffering at Dartmouth, meditation brought me the clarity to see the privilege in my suffering. It was true that no one was fully able to understand my pain -- it was my own and I learned to accept that no one else would understand. Yet, no one denied the existence of my pain. If I chose to talk about it, I would always get sympathy, if not empathy. Other students at Dartmouth are often not afforded the same luxury.

It is a scary reality that at Dartmouth (and everywhere else in this country), students' suffering stemming from their racial or sexual identities is often not accepted as real. It blows my mind, day in and day out, that humans believe they can decide who does and does not suffer. No one is at fault for failing to understand someone else's pain. We fundamentally cannot understand one another. But if you can read my story, and believe in the existence of my pain, then I hope you can pay that belief forward. Stories of students suffering because of their identities are not mine to tell. But they are out there, and they are everywhere. Go listen.