I’ve always been a sick child. The flu, a broken arm, or an ear infection. Always too the doctor, then home. I’d get well, and just as I was able to get out of bed, some other mystery illness would send me back to my nest of blankets that were perpetually soaked in cough syrup and snot. My grandma would come sit with me and every time I’d say, “But grandma you’re not sick. This is the sick bed,” and every time she’d promptly respond with, “I care so much I’m sick!” Being well below the appropriate reading level of anything Ray Bradbury had written, it took me a few years to understand that while I had thought my sweet grandmother was being ‘grandmotherly’ she was actually quoting the post-apocalyptic novel Fahrenheit 451 to an 8 year old.
To be fair to my grandmother, she was definitely onto something. I wish I could say I got better physically, but I just got better at handling. The malaise kept coming. Mentally, I was on a slippery slope. I was tired and angry. I woke up tired just to go back to bed angry and then I woke up angry the next day just to spend my whole day exhausted. I attribute most of my hatred-related-exhaustion to high school, which was a shame because I really do love to learn. High School made me angry. The coursework was too easy
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I was so bothered by the disease, war, hatred, racism, discrimination, misogyny, and ignorance of my lawmakers (you know all of the glorious things high schoolers like me think about on a regular basis). I was bothered that no one else around me was bothered by those things. I was bothered that people could sit in their little bubble of ignorance and have no empathy for people who were suffering or even for people they were directly abusing. I was bothered that I had been sitting around doing nothing, just like the people I was so quick to criticize. Like Bradburry says in Fahrenheit 451, “We need to be bothered once in awhile,” and I had been thoroughly