I couldn’t sleep. My sheets were damp with a stinging, nervous sweat. My mind was narrowed to a few thoughts that wrestled in my head and made my guts feel like acid. It was the spring of my freshman year. I had three finals the next morning and I was wide awake at 5 a.m.

I was horrified that I didn’t know everything. This was finals week; I couldn’t have possibly studied enough. I would imagine question that I didn’t know the answers to. Reality shifted to a murky soup of words and study guides and a painful breakout of zits. “Why are you doing this to me?” I mumbled crazily in the dark. “I never did anything to you.”

This question is rarely considered. Why finals week? It’s taken as a fact of life about college and about life, much like segregation and wife-beating was only decades ago. But against the swift force of social embrace, racism and misogyny were recognized for their injustice and brutality. The principle behind finals week has its roots in the same rancid soil as all human violations.

It’s rape. Finals week is rape. The university exercises dominance over the student body until they have wrestled us to the floor and have groped us with the claws of knowledge.

Biblical cities have been destroyed for what they do to us after that.

We ask for it. We walk around campus with our academic swagger and plunging necklines. I enroll in courses knowing full well that it’s going to end badly — with me holding my knees in shower, weeping.

I sat at my desk this week, again broken out, again sweating, again with acid reflux. I sat and tried to focus on writing a paper while being distracted by two other papers and this column.

Why are you doing this, Dylan? I thought. And I began to deduce.

I’m doing it because its finals week. It’s finals week because I’m in college. I’m in college because I want to have a good job. I want to have a good job so I can eat. I want to eat because I get hungry almost everyday.

Farther down this rabbit hole I considered how dependant my degree is on the higher functions of culture and society. My writing will fail to feed me when the rest of the population starts starving. Starving people don’t read.

I looked back down at the notes and texts lying on my desk. I looked up at black words glowing against the white on laptop monitor. You’re useless, I thought; no one can eat this shit.

Things are only as valuable as the values we assign them. Food is valuable to us because of its role in the continuation of our existence.

I wondered how stressed I would be if my cupboards were bare. I thought about how important my Literature of the American West essays would be if I hadn’t eaten in days. I decided that I’m putting a lot of faith in this structured society to keep functioning.

I need fed, healthy people to fulfill their reading needs. I also need a degree.

The degree is a piece of paper symbolic of how I paid someone a lot of money to let me do work for them. It’s a backwards idea, but only because it’s a product of a culture with too much spare time on its hand. Since we don’t have to worry about panther attacks, fording rivers, or surviving the winter, we’ve invented things to be worried about.

Finals week is the most stressful thing in my modern life. I fear there is some great physical danger in failing. I lie awake, lose my appetite, and break out as a response to the idea of a future without a degree, a future without all level of structure.

Without it, I could sleep under a bridge or go hungry. I might lie awake under that bridge. I might not be able to sleep from the hunger and my horrible complexion. This could last a lifetime.

Though the fear of a future under bridges is abstract, it doesn’t feel abstract. The threat of failure within the perimeters of this institution looms as dark and foreboding as failure at life—failure as a human being. Escaping this future doesn’t feel like a choice; it feels like a law. A law biding me to lost sleep and acid flux. A law requiring that I have a degree.

This finals week, I do what I must.