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Letter from the Editors: On Health
Last night, for the first time in a long while, I did something with concern for my own health in mind. I had been working in the study room of my dorm ...
Zoe
Last night, for the first time in a long while, I did something with concern for my own health in mind. I had been working in the study room of my dorm building, trying to keep my eyes on an increasingly blurry paragraph about colonial perspectives of late 19th-century Africa. Sitting across from me was a friend who had her head down, in a nap that was probably half-intentional. It was around 12:30 a.m.I stood up, closed my book mid-page and decided to go to bed. The ten hours of sleep that followed were the best I’d had all semester, even if they weren’t entirely guilt-free.
There’s no denying that senior year is supposed to be stressful, that university is a time of intense study and burgeoning caffeine addiction. But as we pile on assignments and Google Calendar events, wrenching the mechanisms of our bodies into various working modes, the knowledge that fellow students are doing the same should not be comforting. Academia is about intellectual prowess and curiosity; but sometimes, while struggling to keep our eyes open for the next paragraph, the next hour, it can feel more like a test of physical endurance.
Health in today’s world is increasingly valorized and glamorized; we see it in the spreads of lifestyle magazines, in the green gleam of an Instagrammed avocado. As someone who was once spotted drinking yoghurt through a straw, I do not particularly consider myself an authority on health trends or #eatingclean. But I’m glad that NYU Abu Dhabi has been encouraging students to talk about wellbeing on campus, and that mental health is becoming a bigger part of that conversation.
Various articles in this issue focus on one specific aspect of health, but their overall aim is to acknowledge the fact that often, mental and physical become inseparable. I realized this during a semester abroad in Morocco, after a bout of stomach illness left me suddenly sick, the sickest I’d ever been in my life. A clinic trip, a couple injections and a week of rice and carrots later, I was more or less better. But there lingered an inherent discomfort with how quickly, how spectacularly and powerfully, my own digestive system had betrayed me. I had never broken a bone, never even had a cavity. The months that followed left me grappling with my relationship to my own body, one that I now felt alienated and estranged from.
Bodies and minds have limits, weaknesses, moments of malfunction. Truly recovering from my illness began with acknowledging these boundaries and learning how to respect them. It is not just a lifestyle, but also an incredibly difficult and taxing mindset. More than anything, health means taking care of yourself. It means sometimes putting your interests before others. It means going to bed when you need to go to bed.
The Gazelle’s hope for this issue was to show the full diversity of health at NYUAD, in all its mental, emotional, spiritual, physical and interpersonal facets. It does not aim to promote certain lifestyles or ways of thinking, but rather to make visible campus efforts that have been ongoing for a while. This issue was only possible thanks to the students who opened up about their individual experiences with health and wellbeing. We hope that their stories prove helpful and inspiring, and that they can serve as landmarks for a conversation which still has a long way to go.
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Joey
I started to think that something was wrong last semester, in the spring of my junior year. It was a night that my roommate and I had carved out for studying. We had many nights like that — each sitting at her desk for hours, maybe a break for cheese and jam and then back to work until we collapsed from exhaustion. That night, at about 2 a.m., we heard somebody screaming for help.It isn’t my place to say any more about the incident except what it taught me about myself. Without minding it, I had fallen into a very single-minded routine for work efficiency, and this incident blindsided me. Somebody I saw regularly had been in trouble and I didn’t notice.
My roommate said something that I can’t forget: “We hear it this time, but think of all the people who don’t make a sound.”
I saw that my priorities were lopsided. Narrow. Selfish. Over the years at NYU Abu Dhabi, I had fine-tuned and chiseled down my focus so well on intellectual, academic and career goals. Coming back from study abroad helped me see how much sharper this focus becomes on Saadiyat Campus. The emphasis and demand are always on self-improvement — already a self-centered realm. Narrower still is that the areas of self-improvement tend to fall heavily, if not entirely, on academia and career. Perhaps that’s what university is for, and I couldn’t blame it for creating such an environment. I could blame myself.
Coming out of that night, I decided that one of my goals is friendship. The same way that we set goals for classes, extra-curriculars and career, I wanted to set and work toward friendship goals. To commit time, energy and care to relationships. I’m not doing it perfectly now, but I’m working on it.
It is my hope that this special issue on health will help bring to light the struggles that many of us, and many other university students, continue to confront — whether overtly or silently. Maybe it will help others come out of the same kind of narrow vision that I had. Maybe it will remind us to take care of each other.
Joey Bui and Zoë Hu are co-editors-in-chief. Email them at feedback@thegazelle.org.
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