Introspection
Cancer, or the Day God Was Sick
There’s no way to talk or write about illness; none that is good enough, anyway.
In Character
I wondered, aside from the fever, what had caused me to empathize so fully, to transplant my selfhood into Anna? And even more troubling — why had I enjoyed it, the metallic shuddering, the billowing steam, the overwhelming sense that everything was about to end?
Harvard and Me Introspection
The line between Harvard and me becomes ever more murky, and harder to trace. I want to know where it is, where Harvard stops and where I begin.
Sick, in a Grieving Way
That was when I turned to Harvard & The Legacy of Slavery Report. Reading it made me feel like I was having a spiritual heart attack.
Mission Introspection
Sometimes it just felt like there wasn’t much to say. Sometimes it felt like the right words to say weren’t there.
Chase Introspection
I started a job at a local independent bookstore. Work didn’t fix my loneliness, though I’d secretly hoped it would.
Tess Journalism Introspection
Journalism hooked me not with the first headline that was by me, but with the one that was about me.
[REDACTED]
It was the first time anyone had acknowledged we were doing the work of grown-ups, that we could change our peers’ lives. Editing, arbitrating, and publishing meant playing God while still a child.
Walking in Step
For the previous year or so, I’d been oscillating about whether or not to serve an 18-month mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Harvard and Me
I was the only person I knew of coming to Harvard from South Africa, and, in turn, I was to everyone in South Africa the only person they knew going to Harvard — which is to say, I became Harvard.
On Multicultural London English and the Power of Code Switching
Code switching in the past had helped me to better connect with people from any and every background; why should this new environment be any different?
Leaving the Church, Keeping Its Ties
I have no idea why I chose to go back to Utah. When my parents called me a few weeks earlier and asked if I wanted a ticket, I said yes on autopilot. Later, I felt dishonest. I was embarrassed to be flying home for a religion I was supposed to have completely disavowed.
Ryan Introspection 1
Ryan with his parents and younger brother, Alan, at a cousin’s wedding reception earlier this spring.
Ryan Introspection 3
Ryan stands with Kenneth B. Morris Jr. before a Belfast mural of his great-great-great-grandfather, Frederick Douglass.
Skating Beyond Legacy Lines
You can only circle an area so many times before the joy dulls into monotony.
A Pathetic Aesthetic
The aestheticization — dare I say fetishization — of female pain reaffirms the conditions that made girls sad in the first place. Simply put, the Sad Girl reeks of complacency.
Learning to Fail
Is it vulnerable or honest about the reality of being at this school? Or is it playing to an aesthetic standard of what a Harvard student is supposed to be: personality, friendships, and academic success, all in one? These performances feed into a perception, however misguided, of students at Harvard and other elite universities as universally capable and flawless super-students, without even the possibility of failure.
A Senior’s River Run
Ever since I got to Harvard, I’ve wanted to make my time as “normal” as possible to correct for the abnormality in my path to this institution.
Taking the Bait
College admissions for selective institutions have no longer become a competition of test grades or grade point averages, but a race to the bottom to demonstrate prodigious authenticity.
Revelations in Rebuilding
What I’d intended as an outpouring of vulnerability, she’d seen as an ability to overcome adversity.