I have an autoimmune disorder and I don’t like talking about it. But I spent my time in quarantine having uncomfortable conversations about my health with my closest friends. I felt I needed to because as an immunocompromised person on campus, I’m more afraid of getting Covid-19 from my closest friends than from someone on a busy sidewalk in the city. I have a very real sense of what’s at stake for me, so I trust myself to wear my mask correctly and keep my distance. But to let my guard down with my friends, it means that I must also trust them. I wouldn’t put myself in a position where I was likely to catch the virus, but would my friends take the risk?

I’ve had to remind the people I love that their decisions directly affect my life; therefore, if they want to spend time with me, they must be as cautious as I am. Scott, another immunocompromised student on campus who chose to remain anonymous, reminded me that as difficult as those conversations are, they need to happen.

“People assume that if I am young, then I should not worry about Covid-19 at all,” he shared.

Being a young person with an autoimmune disorder can be embarrassing. Many of us hide it if we can. You would be surprised how invisible chronic illness can be. Many of us don’t bring it up unless we have to. However, talking about our vulnerability helps people see the very real consequences some have to face in this pandemic, and why these restrictions are so important, especially here on a university campus where we are all so prone to feeling invincible.

It’s an awkward balance to strike: I depend on my friends’ responsibility, but asking them to change their behavior for me can bring out a lot of insecurity. Choosing to spend time around a friend who is immunocompromised means that with every decision you make you have to ask yourself: if I were immunocompromised, would I still make this decision? It can feel like a big ask.

Scott confessed, “I don’t want to sound like a nanny. So I usually give up on [friends who don’t understand].” The fear of asking our friends to look out for us can force us to isolate ourselves from the people we care about.

But if my friends’ decisions affect my safety, then their friends’ decisions do too. It only takes a few degrees of separation before the decisions of every single person on campus affect me. What I am asking of the people closest to me is simply to behave in the way that everyone in our community is obligated to. Coming back to Saadiyat was an incredible act of trust in the entire NYU Abu Dhabi community.

To be clear, most of us with autoimmune disorders are not balls of anxiety locked up in our towers. Many of us don’t plan on being much more cautious than the campus rules already tell us to be. The most vulnerable on campus can live as normal a life as anyone else if we all cooperate. In semesters prior to this one, there have been gray zones in some campus rules as well as times when we could turn a blind eye to those who broke the rules. But these are not those kinds of rules, and this is not that kind of semester. The NYUAD community has never before been asked to work as a team to such an extent.

I also believe that few other schools in the world are in a better position to work together on this than we are. Not only has our administration been more cautious than many other universities, but so many of our students, not just our immunocompromised friends, hold high stakes in this. Most of us have traveled many thousands of miles to get here and many of us don’t know where else we would go if the campus were to shut down. We also can’t forget our many peers stuck around the world, waiting for us to prove that we are responsible so they can join us here. We have strong motivation to collaborate. But the most important reason why I have faith in our ability to work together is that we all love this community enough to want to ride out the pandemic together.

At the end of the day, those of us with autoimmune disorders are here on campus because we trust you. We all have different reasons for being here but what we all have in common is that this is the best and safest place for us to be. This semester, we, as a community, are demanding more from one another than ever before.