Has your teen seemed depressed, irritable, and down in the dumps lately? Have you noticed a change in their sleep schedule, maybe they sleep for longer but look equally as tired as before they slept? Have you seen the carcasses of several woodland creatures strewn across their room where there hadn’t been before?
Fret not! Your teenager is not becoming Patient 0 of the zombie apocalypse– rather, they’re feeling the effects of what we professionals like to call, “The Doldrums of May”.
Similar to The Ides of March, The Doldrums of May (TDM) foster a sense of uneasiness and suspicion in any student suffering from public high school. Students often feel stuck, despite nearing the end of the school year, and almost seem to give up while the finish line is only a couple weeks away.
This is a phenomenon almost contradictory to the average person’s perception of a race, but symptoms of TDM have also been known to appear in long-distance runners towards the end of their race. Leading scientists in the field hypothesize that this feeling of immense fatigue and despondency – so close to both the literal and metaphorical “finish line” – is due to an almost Pavlovian reaction toward the concept of finishing a hard task.
As soon as a participant reaches a pause in their grind forward and realizes that the end is in sight, they become so overcome with the possibility of rest as a reward within reach that they hit a slump. It’s also very similar to the scenario in which strength leaves a soldier as soon as they see their campsite.
In teenagers at the end of another treacherous high school year – especially seniors on the verge of graduation – TDM presents itself very similarly to most zombie infections. Red eyes, sluggish movements, speech reduced to grunts, erratic eating habits, and a corpse-like pallor are all signs of both diseases.
To properly discern the difference between certain death and your teenager’s melodrama, keep an eye out for disgusting bite marks. Zombie bite marks.
Despite anyone’s best efforts, TDM is chronic until either graduation or the beginning of summer. The only thing that works to ward off the disease (if only for a short period of time) is the consumption of energy drinks. It gives the affected the opportunity to feel something but despair, even if that feeling is the caffeine actively carbonating their blood.
At Sentinel High School, energy drinks are abundantly free-flowing and students can be found drinking them like water. Millions of dollars are spent on the school’s collective addiction, and Sentinel students are often credited for the continued success of many local coffee shops within the area. As to what this says about the student body…
A conclusion that could be drawn from this addiction: all of the Sentinel High School students are zombies. Or, they’re all just terminally infected with TDM. As a student myself, I think it’s the second option.
This can be specifically reflected in the shenanigans that ensue within the school year, eventually escalating into the final stretch of school at the end of the year. Namely, the senior’s brand of tomfoolery.
Although Sentinel isn’t known for its senior pranks (because there hasn’t been any of merit in the last four years), this doesn’t mean the seniors are entirely inactive.
This year’s seniors are actually rather infamous for instilling a large amount of “senior skip days”. Admittedly, this is a school-wide issue, but the sheer amount of skip days they’ve been doing is rather egregious.
They’ve also accumulated a reputation for being…aloof. That’s the nice way of putting it.
The class of ‘26 is done caring. They’ve been trapped in this school with the same 500 people for the last four years, and they’re sick of it. They act as if their spirit has finally been broken, and more and more as though they’re zoo animals stalking the length of their enclosure. It’s rather sad to witness.
Much of high school is like this, but it’s a very interesting sort of social experiment to actively observe the change from bright-eyed freshman to dead-eyed senior. One could even say that the dichotomy is crazy.
The evolution throughout all four years of high school can also be compared to the Stanford Prison Experiment or Lord of the Flies. They all involve the same premise of locking a large group of people in an isolated area, and the results are much the same, too.
As the middle of the food chain, sophomores and juniors don’t express the deepest ends of the high school spectrum, but they’re quick to fill in their roles as soon as the graduating class leaves.
Sophomores often don’t have much to do, and this year is either the worst year of high school or simply just another one. They’re not as terrible as the freshman, but they’re also not as world-weary as the juniors. They’re kind of just… there. And that’s exactly what the food chain requires.
Juniors, on the other hand, have the whole future ahead of them but not close enough to do anything about. They’ve got a whole year still ahead of them, but their entire life just has to be planned out as soon as physically possible. This process is what prepares them for the malaise of senior year. Such is the cycle of life.
All in all, the ouroboro of TDM and its effect on Sentinel High School is currently nuking the overall spirit of the student body.
In this final stretch to summer, students are stumbling along and army crawling to the finish line, as they have since the beginning of public education. At least nobody’s been eaten alive. Yet.
