A report from researchers at Duke University sounds an alarm about the anxiety and depression among female undergraduates who aspire to “effortless perfection.” They believe they should display perfect beauty, perfect womanhood, and perfect scholarship all without trying (or at least without appearing to try).

To answer my unsolved questions, as I had done my whole life, I turned to literature. I turned to the women I had long imagined as a council of mothers: Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara. They had advised me, consoled me, sustained me, saved me before. I needed them now more than ever. And, I turned to memoirs of madness.

In his memoir Darkness Visible, William Styron argues that depression, despite the cold, precise terms in which we currently discuss it, is more than anything a disease of disorder and loss of control. He writes that “our perhaps understandable modern need to dull the sawtooth edges of so many of the afflictions we are heir to has led us to banish the harsh old-fashioned words: madhouse, asylum, insanity, melancholia, lunatic, madness. But never let it be doubted that depression, in its extreme form, is madness.

She was honest with him about how much this concerned her, and Joseph was well aware of her concern, telling the Study on several occasions that Olivia often told him how difficult he was to truly know. “I’m self-sufficient,” he said. “My biggest weakness is not leaning on anybody. I’m just made that way.” Joseph was tuned in enough to other people that he could see and articulate their difficulty with him, but he could never get past a core, deeply rooted fear that is not uncommon: he didn’t want to be a burden, or to feel anything but fully independent. Though he attended Harvard, Joseph came from humble beginnings, and told the Study that he learned the value of self-sufficiency as a child on his family farm, where he spent days on end operating a horse-drawn plow alone.

Elizabeth Alexander offers an answer in The Trayvon Generation. She describes having frequently visited a conference room at Yale University for over fifteen years as a faculty member and never once noting that the painting at the front of the room of benefactor Elihu Yale, after whom the university is named, included a small brown boy at his feet with an iron collar around his neck linked to a chain. She was shocked by her “delayed comprehension.” “I did my work under the matter-of-fact, unproblematized image of an enslaved brown figure at the foot of the most venerated person in the university’s history.

Think of Tyler showing up to school— possibly prospecting for food in trash cans along the way. He’s undoubtably in a preoccupying state of churn. He knows he might be seen and treated in school based on the poverty and status of his family, on skill and vocabulary deficiencies possibly tied to that poverty, on having a dialect and even clothes that reflect his social status, on not having seen much of the world outside his neighbourhood, and so on.