Finding Community Before I Burned Out

I came to ASU excited, ambitious, and honestly a little determined to prove that I could handle everything on my own. I was the kind of student who told myself that being tired was normal, being overlooked was normal, and feeling out of place was just part of adjusting to college. During my first semester, I kept moving like I had something to prove every single day. I went to class, worked, answered discussion posts, and kept telling my family back home that everything was fine. What I did not say was that I was spending a lot of energy trying to read every room before I entered it. In some classes, I was one of only a few Black students. I noticed how often I was expected to represent a whole perspective instead of just being one student with my own thoughts. I noticed how easily professors or classmates could talk about race in abstract ways while I was sitting there carrying the real weight of it. None of those moments looked dramatic by themselves, but they added up fast. The exhaustion was not just academic. It was social and emotional too. I started questioning whether I should speak up when something felt off or whether it would be easier to stay quiet and protect my energy. I thought about how I dressed, how I spoke in group projects, and whether I was being perceived as approachable enough, serious enough, or “professional” enough. That kind of self-monitoring became part of my normal routine, and I did not have language for how heavy it was becoming. The shift happened when I finally got connected to Black student community at ASU. I started going to events and meeting people who did not need a long explanation to understand what I meant when I said I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. Being around other Black students helped me realize that I was not isolated because I was doing college wrong. I was responding to an environment that often asked for adjustment without offering the same level of care in return. What changed most for me was not that everything suddenly became easy. It was that I stopped treating my experience like a private weakness. I began to understand Black fatigue as something real: the cumulative stress of navigating spaces where you are visible and invisible at the same time, welcomed in theory but not always fully understood in practice. Once I could name that, I could also start making choices that supported me instead of just forcing myself to endure. I still take my academics seriously. I still care about succeeding here. But I no longer think success should require silence, overexplanation, or constant self-erasure. Community gave me a way to stay grounded, and it reminded me that being supported is not the same thing as asking for special treatment. It is asking for the basic conditions that allow students to learn, contribute, and belong without being depleted all the time.