Johnston Gate, Harvard

Lost & Found

Freshman year move-in day kicked off orientation week. I had been assigned to a rooming group of five, in Weld Hall, one of the dorms in Harvard Yard. Or, as one of Weld’s famous former residents, JFK, would have said, Hahvahd Yahd.

Lost & Found

On being homesick at Harvard, and the things that got got me through. A sample chapter from my upcoming book.

Freshman year move-in day kicked off orientation week. I had been assigned to a rooming group of five, in Weld Hall, one of the dorms in Harvard Yard. Or, as one of Weld’s famous former residents, JFK, would have said, Hahvahd Yahd.

The Yahd was a grassy quadrangle dotted with deciduous trees, enclosed in brick walls, and abutting the buzzy Harvard Square. Paths criss-crossed the grass and connected the buildings within. These were most of the freshman dorms (upperclassmen housing was further away), Widener library, Lamott Library, humanities lecture halls and classrooms, Memorial Church, Harvard’s administrative buildings, and the bronze statue of John Harvard, with the shiny boot and famous falsehoods, where tours began.

I knew my roommates’ names and where they were from, but that was it. I hadn’t met anyone until we hauled our boxes and milk crates and file cabinets and sound systems and the chotchkes we were buying at the shops around Harvard Square up the stairs to Weld 43. Our parents helped. We were awkward but tried to sound smart like we thought Harvard kids should sound. Or maybe that was just me.

Weld 43 had a common room, with three adjoining bedrooms—two doubles with bunk beds, and one single. The co-ed bathroom was down the hall.

Our outfits on move-in day, more than any other thing, imprinted indelibly in my mind. They were expressive. I wore khaki tab-front short shorts, slightly distressed, a purple tank top with a white tie-dyed band around the chest, platform sandals with wide leather straps, and the silver necklace of my mom’s, from Santa Fe, that I never took off.

The first roommate I met, Liz, wore baby blue chino shorts and a matching baby blue sweater set with thin gold jewelry, beigy gold flip flops. She had driven from Akron, Ohio with her mom, dad and little sister. I would come to find out that this outfit contrasted with her bold personality. Later she told me I looked very “west coast” which was probably true. I was the only one from west of the Mississippi.

Alicia, from Philadelphia, had on a white V-neck tee shirt and jeans. She was funny, witty, alarmingly smart, but down to earth.

Our fourth roommate, Rebecca, was from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She arrived in a striped button-up shirt with a popped collar, and a pink sweater tied around her neck. I had only ever seen overtly preppy outfits like this on adults who were dressed for golf or tennis—in movies. Her towels, sheets, bags, pretty much every fabric thing she owned, was monogrammed with her initials. She called her mom Muzzy.

Our fifth roommate, Louisa, was a fourth generation Harvard legacy from Boston; her sister was a junior ahead of us. Her whole family came to help. She was blonde and funny, larger than life, and planned to go out for cheerleading.

Louisa and I were bunkmates. Alicia and Rebecca took the other double. Liz had the single. We would switch after first semester, an agreement brokered by parents, who were also trying hard to sound smart, and to not freak out.

The purpose of move-in day was to settle, to nest, to get comfortable in our new residence. But the effect, for me, was inverted. As shower caddies and desk organizers and bathrobes found homes on plastic hooks from Ace, and shelves purchased at the Coop were cobbled together in corners, the fact that I was leaving home finally hit home.

My mom scavenged for textiles and artful objects that might impart texture and style to the yellow bricks of modular dorm room furniture. We set up my music and stacked my books. Objects found places. But I knew I had lost mine.

I was the kid who hated sleepaway camp, who sometimes felt a tinge of missing home, and my mom, even when I went to school in the morning. And now I was about to be as far away from both as you could get in the continental US, a geographic and existential dilemma I had somehow avoided until move-in day.

As the reality of going to Harvard caught up with the honor of going to Harvard, a sickly panic took up residence in my stomach. During the orientation events that followed that week—stats and chemistry exams, taking pictures for student IDs, a “mixer” on the steps of Widener—a constantly running mental clock ticked away the minutes I had to stay until I could literally run back up Garden street to the Sheraton Commander and my mom. Because behind that count of minutes was a more somber one—the hours and days before she left for good. I counted time with the grim finality of a death row inmate.

On her last night, we had dinner in the lobby. Then, in the hotel bed beside her, I cried big ugly gasping sobs until they and I finally extinguished into exhausted slumber. Mom left for her flight the next morning, wearing dark Ray Bans she had bought to cover her eyes.

Since we came from farther away, she had stayed longer than most parents did during orientation. The hope was that that once she was gone, I would feel better, that her hanging around had prolonged the pain of separation, like slowly removing a bandaid.

After she left, I felt different, but not better. The panic of count-down became the nausea of acute homesickness. Most kids—the ones who didn’t go to prep schools, at least—experience the pain of displacement when they go to college. All of my roommates were close with their parents, and missed them. But, like at Camp Firwood, I’m pretty sure I won the prize for the homesickest kid.

Almost as soon as mom got back from dropping me off, she must have sent the care package that arrived just a couple days later. It had her homemade chocolate chip oatmeal cookies, Red Vines licorice, The Miseducation of Lauren Hill CD, which had just dropped, and a pair of burgundy proto-Juicy velour pajamas. For many weeks, even months, I basically lived in those pajamas. I ached, slept, and moped in them, and only changed for class.

And I lost my appetite. If I ate anything at all, it came from the vending machine in the basement of Weld, by the laundry, or from the Science Center snackbar, in between classes. I could not bring myself to go to the dining hall for regular meals for months. Skipping meals was probably the worst thing I could do, but meals twisted the knife of missing home that was already lodged in my gut.

John Harvard statue
John Harvard and his shiny shoe. Much rubbed by tourists.

Not every language has a word for “home” in addition to “house.” Witold Rybczynski, the architect and author of the book Home: A Short History of an Idea, writes that the word home “connotes a physical ‘place,’ but also has the more abstract sense of a ‘state of being.’” The English word derives from the Old Norse root heima, as does the German, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic and Dutch—and “brought together the meaning of house and of household, of dwelling and of refuge, of ownership and of affection. ‘Home’ meant the house, but also everything that was in it and around it, and the sense of satisfaction and contentment that these conveyed.”

To be homesick, then, is to miss not just the physical dwelling place, the house—although that is part of it—but the feelings, affections, and states of being it held. I missed the feeling of coming home after school and sports, the sense of return, and how cozy, safe, and enclosed I felt there. And, also, I missed the sense of belonging, of being known, I had at home.

Just as a carpenter might make a house with their labors, home was a thing my mom built with the countless invisible actions non-moms the world over never notice. But a lot I did notice, and chief among them was cooking. Home as a state of being was inextricably bound up with my mom’s cooking. Home had a flavor.

Meals represented my mom, and home. Coming home from school, in the dark and rainy northwest, the house glowed with lights, candles, music bouncing off the walls and, soon, the smells and sounds of food. Eating together as a family was a daily ritual that took place at home.

Growing up, everyone thinks their mom’s spaghetti is best, but I actually knew my mom’s spaghetti was the best. I always knew that my mom was a really good cook, ditto my grandma, and my aunt. Strong women talking and caring about food were some of my most potent childhood memories. This was special, an important part of our identity, but not something we should gloat about to others. We were food snobs, but polite about it.

I never thought cafeteria meals would be as good as my mom’s. But Harvard didn’t have cafeterias. It had dining halls. And when you saw the freshman dining hall, Annenburg, you understood why. The word cafeteria would be an insult.

Annenberg Hall, Harvard.
Annenberg Hall, Harvard.

Annenburg was housed in a neo-gothic brick building on the far side of the yard, with a multi-colored gabled roof and ornate windows. Inside, the dining room was like a cathedral, a vast space centered under huge, decoratively carved wood trusses in the shape of the pointed arch ceiling they supported. The Gothic-style ceiling vaulted dramatically, some forty feet above our freshman crania. Two columns of elegant [and enormous] chandeliers lit the cavernous space and brought out the gleam in walnut walls and the rows and columns of long wooden table that were always polished to a shine.

This was the room where we were to eat toast in the morning.  It was stunning. It was insane. It was beautiful. It was built in 1840.

But the food we ate there was less inspiring. A smaller room attached to the dining hall was where the food was served, in buffets of steam tables or refrigerated wells. This was the cafeteria part. And while I didn’t expect cafeteria food to rival my mom’s, I did not expect it to suck quite as much as it did. My grandma, who had a terrible tell when she didn’t like a dish, would have made a lot of funny faces in there.

I struggled with the new ritual of balancing trays and plates, and choosing—with hungry people breathing down your neck—between cereal, or sandwiches, or salads, or gloppy piles of hot food. The hamburger patties were grey and curling at the edge, potatoes were gluey, noodles overcooked, machine-sliced vegetable medleys untouched by seasoning. Salad dressings had suspicious surface tension, unnaturally emulsified and overly sweet. Gravy was too thick, with a weird sheen. It all gave me weird farts. It didn’t taste good. It made me miss my mom.

Plus, I felt strange going to such an august space by myself, and I was alone a lot, because I was homesick and moping, a self-perpetuating state.

So, for a long time, I didn’t go to Annenburg, or have regular meals, at all.

Sometimes I wondered why Harvard’s excellence did not extend to the food. To my mom food was important—as was politics, the ecology of forests, literature, music. But you talked about those things over good food, while you also talked about the food.

Maybe Harvard misunderstood something I didn’t quite get either, back then. While I missed my mom’s cooking, I didn’t think that the regular rhythm of family meals, or the pleasure, community and nourishment of such good food might have been part of why I had been successful in high school. That the lunches my mom packed with leftovers, that stunk up my high school locker with last night’s cheesy-oniony twice baked potato or spicy stir-fry, might have provided something more than kilocalories, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.

Most Harvard students had a significant blind spot when it came to all the things, other than their own brilliance and drive, that had contributed to their getting into Harvard. So while I never took for granted the fact that my mom was a badass cook who made delicious food, I had taken for granted what that did for me, and how meals work their particular magic. I thought school and meals, mind and body, were separate things. I think Harvard did too.

We’ll come back to this.

When I had imagined going off to Harvard, it seemed like a logical next step in what had been a trajectory of setting goals and then achieving them. I thought I was responsible for these achievements, and that I was self-determined and transferrable. That who I was within my family unit and friend group, in the Pacific Northwest, was the same as who I would be far away in a totally different place.

But identity is also relational. We develop confidence and ability and articulate our sense of ourselves in relationship to family, friends, social groups, place. At Harvard, every single fixed point from which I had triangulated who I was, and my place in the world, was suddenly gone.

I had moved from informal, friendly, small-town Washington (that I now had to constantly clarify with the word state) to the very reserved and much more urban Boston and Cambridge. Compared to the Guy Smiley northwest, Bostonians seemed cold. And I went from the West Coast’s anything and anyone goes social network to the much more blue blooded East Coast.

One day I woke up from a nap on the top bunk, wearing my magenta pajamas, to Louisa and Rebecca in the common room, paging through the freshman year facebook. Facebook, back then, was just a weird term Harvard used for the yearbook that I, being from the west coast, thought was another east coast thing. I hadn’t even remembered to send in a picture.

They were flipping back and forth between listings, looking at people’s addresses. I heard them shriek when they realized two guys in the room below us in Weld had the same address on Park Avenue in New York. Apparently, they lived in the same very expensive and important building on the Upper East Side.

I got my cell phone, walked down the steps to the grass in the Yard, called my mom and cried about how weird it was here.

My high school friends and I might have paged through the “facebook” (though we would not have called it that) looking for cute guys or people we knew. We might make shallow remarks. But to be looking for addresses that represented wealth and status, at the ripe age of eighteen? This was unheard of. Back home, it would have been considered lame to even admit that you noticed or cared about how much money someone had, or that their family was a big deal. Maybe, in a way, that was just our own kind of snobbery, but it was the one I knew.

And then there were the finals clubs. I had gone from a girl-powered high school social scene, to Harvard’s largely male dominated one, which was centered around parties at male-only Finals Clubs. Women lined up like chattel, in lines, to be allowed in only if you were hot enough. I found it humiliating, like going back in time. When I told my mom about it, she said “You guys should egg the fucking finals clubs.”

I wasn’t just homesick; I was place-sick, coast-sick and culture shocked. I felt adrift.

Fortunately, my mom’s care package was the gift that kept on giving. One day Liz asked if she could borrow my Lauren Hill CD. We were in that awkward not-quite-friends stage. Once, we had coffee together in the Science Center. I knew her vending machine preferences were Twizzlers (weird), or Peanut M & Ms (solid) from time in the common room. But that was about it. It didn’t help that I mostly opted out of meals in the dining hall, social events, and basically anything other than class that required changing out of my magenta jammies.

Then, a little over a month into freshman fall, Liz asked if I wanted to see the scary movie Urban Legends with her. Self-referential/spoofy slasher movies were trending at the time—and this was one of those. From the trailer I gathered it was about college kids being murdered in ways that mimicked famous urban legends, starring the girl from Noxema commercials.

I hate scary movies, including the ironic ones WHICH ARE STILL VERY SCARY. I can scare myself to death unaided, so I do not like to inflict terror upon myself for fun. Even during intense moments in regular movies, I sometimes plug my ears and close my eyes the moment the music turns weird.

But Liz, I learned that day, was calmly persuasive. When she didn’t like the answer you gave her, she would set her round, large brown eyes on you and wait it out. Which is what she did when I tried to tell her how much I really, really did not like scary movies.

But I did not want to be rude—I wanted to be friends. And since she did not appear to be taking no for an answer, I bucked up. On a random weeknight, we went to the movies.

The T Harvard
The Harvard Square T stop on the Red Line.

The Brattle Theater in Harvard Square was for indy flicks and classics. To see a thriller starring Noxema girl, we had to take the T out to the Alewife stop, to the bigger and more commercial [Sony Fresh Pond]. It was the last stop on the Red Line, more like the burbs or the hinterlands of Cambridge than the tight urban warren of Harvard Square. We scrambled over the median, down a hill, and across a sprawling parking lot to the movie theater.

During the movie, I stuck to the plan, closing my eyes and plugging my ears whenever the music became creepy, which meant I missed most of it. But the gist of it was as promised: college kids die brutal deaths. By the end I had seen and heard enough to be jacked up on adrenalin and the gallon of sugar and caffeine I had drunk.

We caught a cab back to the Yard because it was late and the T was not running regularly. Roads in Cambridge are tricky, because they began as meandering cow paths, so there isn’t really a grid. It took us a moment to get our bearings. But soon we realized that the cabbie was heading in the opposite direction of Harvard Square, pulling the oldest cabbie trick in the book—fleecing a couple of freshman rubes and taking a roundabout route to jack up the fair.

So he would know we weren’t born yesterday, Liz politely told him that we needed to go the other way, back to Harvard Square. He laughed. And kept on going in the same direction.

Liz and I looked at one another. That was kind of a weird laugh, our eyebrows said. He was taking us further out of Cambridge. We knew roughly where we needed to go—and this was not it. So we restated our protests, less politely.

“Sir, we need to go to Harvard Square. The other way. Back that way.” I said, sternly, while pointing back and to the right. This was a decade before phones with GPS or internet access.  We hadn’t even brought our phones with us.

He laughed again, then mumbled something we couldn’t understand. Liz and I looked at one another again, now beginning to worry, and consider our options.

Casually, so he wouldn’t see me, I tried the door. It was locked.

“The doors are locked!” I said to Liz.

We both started pulling the levers. It all had happened so fast. We were locked in a car, being driven to the boondox outside of Cambridge. There was only one possible explanation: abduction. Followed by gutting.

We began talking over one another, blinking back tears, begging the smurking driver to please take us back to Harvard Yard.

Just as I was pondering how to break a window, the cab stopped and the locks popped up. The driver pointed out his driver-side window. There, one hundred and eighty degrees opposite the direction we thought, was Harvard Yard. He had taken us straight home, hadn’t padded the meter with a single wrong turn. He didn’t speak English that well, but his laughter had been purely amiable, in response to our having the directional awareness of a couple of sunblind moles.

As we crossed Mass Ave, and passed under Johnston Gate, Liz and I started to laugh. This laughter intensified to cry-laughing as we walked across the Yard, with multiple stops for doubled-over laughter, before we climbed the steps to Weld 43, trying not to disturb the slumbering dorm with more laughter.

And old picture of Weld Hall
An old picture of Weld Hall.

It took us a long time to stop laughing at how hopelessly turned around we were, at how much we really believed we were being kidnapped by the poor cabbie. No one could understand what was so funny, and we couldn’t quite explain it, either. It was one of those “you had to be there” experiences. But we learned something about one another that could only be shown, and shared: That we could act like total idiots, and then laugh at ourselves until we cried afterwards.

I have not seen a scary movie since. But that dumb scary movie, that I barely saw, changed my Harvard experience literally overnight. They say trauma forges deep bonds, or that’s what Keanu Reeves said in another awesome movie of the period, Speed. Apparently, this is true even of fake traumas. After that night, and all that laughter, Liz and I were fast friends.

I’m an introvert—a person who craves and needs close relationships, more than lots of them. Without my mom or family, or Bellingham friends who had known me almost my whole life, I felt more than lonely at school. I felt lost.

The escapade with Liz catapulted us from acquaintances to friends. It pulverized the thin film of ice that still needed breaking. I knew I could be my full goofy ridiculous self with Liz, and I was ever after. I didn’t have to perform, or sound smart, or pepper conversation with French words like soignee or bete noir. I could just be me, and she could just be her. The pathway to best friendship, after that night, was short and fast. We paired up like nitrogen atoms.

Soon our bond triangulated to Alicia, our third amigo, who we called Leesh. Liz, Leesh and I went to meals together, studied together, were real with one another. Leesh and I took long walks around Cambridge, talking for hours. Liz and I did almost everything together.

Chef Erin Kimberly Wade with her good friends Liz and Leesh.
Liz, me, and Leesh hanging out.

Rebecca and Louisa, our other two roommates, became a second subgroup, closer to one another than to us. But all five of us got along, went out as a group, went on a trip together, and continued to room together after freshman year.

We all needed those close friendships, and their honest, unguarded conversations to navigate some of the unexpected weirdness of being at an elite university, full of over-achievers.

When I interviewed a Harvard alumnus as part of the admissions process, I talked about how excited I was to be surrounded by likeminded people. My romantic visions of college involved deep discussions in cool coffee houses with soulmates and compatriots: Readers! Thinkers! Fellow nerds! I imagined we would be drawn to one another like moths to a light, and that our similarities would impart a deep sense of belonging, the meaning, I thought, of “collegial.”

So, for a long time I struggled to understand why it didn’t feel like that at all. Why Harvard was so much more difficult than I expected. It wasn’t the classes—although of course, those were challenging. But I had expected that. Professors, and the brilliance of the student body, forced me to think in ways I never knew possible. Sometimes I felt my brain had growing pains. For the first time in my life, I received grades less than A’s even when I was really trying.

What was hardest about Harvard was being surrounded by people who—if you nicked the surface of our different talents, interests and outfits—were so much alike.

The student body was much more ethnically and geographically diverse than my public high school had been. My rooming group hailed from all over the country—Ohio, Boston, Florida, Philly, Seattle. Within the first few weeks of freshman year, I met a Guiness Record holding juggler—who taught me to juggle (yes, everyone can do it), a world-renowned prima ballerina, a famous actress, mathletes and athletes and the youngest person ever to start a charitable foundation with over a million-dollar endowment (she was 12). I met students from Africa, China, Japan, England, South America, Mexico, Canada, France. My best friend and later my boyfriend and half our blocking group were African American, and I had not had a single Black friend back in Bellingham.

But once the novelty had worn off a bit, it was the similarities, more than our differences, that came to the fore. If you looked a bit closer, we were surprisingly—almost creepily—alike. We all had been 4.0 students, gotten very high SAT scores, taken every AP course possible, gotten 5’s on the exams, then excelled at some “other thing.” We exhibited a specific definition of intelligence and were driven, ambitious over-achievers.

Maybe this was to be expected, since those were Harvard’s standards of acceptance. But it went beyond that. To achieve those standards, the vast majority of Harvard students had very supportive, involved parents who were well-educated and upper-middle or upper class. They had the time, money and inclination to haul us all over the state to our various impressive pursuits, and to stay up late or get up early while we studied, to buy us books, school supplies and computers. I knew someone who had her first college planning meeting, and her first SAT class, when she was twelve.

Some students were straight-up geniuses. But even the geniuses were the kind who needed gold stars. We were almost all people who had to get the grade, who had to prove themselves with some measurable achievement.

My high school friend group was outwardly more homogenous, and yet had much more psychosocial diversity. Our personalities were more varied. I had friends from single parents and divorced families. Economically, we were wealthy, poor, and in the middle. Some were funny, others cool, and some rebels or jocks, or rebel jocks. Some were brilliant in less measurable ways that you couldn’t get a grade for—things like humor, style, charisma—and some were smart as fuck but didn’t give a fuck about school. I had friends with crazy quirky style, others who never forgot to make cupcakes on birthdays.

At Harvard, a lot of people who formerly fit into a more diverse matrix of personalities like this were suddenly amongst thousands of others way more like them. This created a white-hot crucible for competition, intellectual stimulation and scholarly achievement. All good things for academics.

Socially, it was weird. Put a bunch of over-achievers together, deprive them of counter-balancing personalities, motivations, and intelligences, and you have the makings of a very strange social experiment—a pre-life identity crisis. Even the smartest kids at Harvard, the most talented, were no longer as exceptional as they had been in high school. We could no longer define ourselves by the old comparisons. This was hard. But it was also an opportunity to discover a more intrinsic sense of worth, or passion. Or, more incentive to double down on the grind, and to search for new and not necessarily healthy things that made us exceptional. Both happened.

But the trouble was more than just the struggles of identity. A world of wunderkinds does not a healthy community make. A healthy community—for life, not just school—needs balance. Harvard wasn’t balanced.

What was missing were people like my locker partner in high school, Jessica, or my sister—people who were more chill, and cool, and funny, whip smart but in a different, less nerdy way. People who had that ineffable quality that you wanted to be around and for whom friends, friendships and relationships were more important than winning/achieving.

Jessica was the person who came up with funny words and language that we would then all use—creating a kind of micro-dialect among my friends. At one point she started using the term “pile” short for “pile of shit” as a term of endearment—as in “Hey Pile,” or “What’s up Pile.” We all copied her and used it long after she had dropped it and come up with something new. She was the one who put a calendar in our locker for a countdown to Christmas, who always remembered people’s birthdays and did something special for them. She was a kind of social glue; she put people at ease; she was the magnetic center of our friend group. She had never claimed it or tried to achieve it, she just was it.

Harvard had a shortage of that kind of person, and so I always thought the social life was a little bit awkward, a little bit forced—Harvard achievers trying to make it something it wasn’t, trying to “network,” a word that gives me the heeby jeebies to this day, because it really means making social life more like school. More like a competition, a doing rather than a being.

Surrounded by strivers like me, I started to question the relentless pursuit of the gold star. In myself, I wondered if it wasn’t even a kind of weakness, rather than the strength I always thought it was. I was driven, yes, but I was also plagued with an infernal need for outward approval.

We’ll come back to this, too.

Even though Cambridge was a special place I came to love, and even though I had found my BFF, and even though I knew how lucky I was to be at Harvard, part of me was never quite at home. I was a nomad. Especially when it came to studying.

At home I had studied on the couch in the living room, which was lined in bookshelves and big bold paintings. Music played loud from speakers tucked in the shelves—anything from Nirvana to Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley to Beethoven, because my mom had crazy eclectic taste in music. Through an opening in the wall between the kitchen and living room, mom and I could talk—or not—and the smell and sound of onions or garlic or broccoli or meat hitting hot oil wafted through.

I never studied in my room. I did almost all my studying on the living room couch, or at the dining room table near it. My sister would be running around, doing her schoolwork, too, or making me laugh, or yell. My dad was more peripheral than my mom, but he was home every night before dinner. When he ran up from the basement he always made a goofy sound like a motor. Every night we had dinner, and then afterwards I would go back to studying while my mom puttered. She would stay up with me, or wake up at the slightest sound if I stayed up super late.

This was the unit into which I fit. The place from which I had done a lot of the achieving that got me into Harvard.

And, so, once at Harvard  I sometimes felt like a displaced and endlessly seeking nomad, looking for a place to study where I could really think. I wandered, and relocated, and went from room, to library, to other library. I was the Goldie Locks of study vibes.

Lamont library was too quiet—I couldn’t concentrate. It made me feel overly self-conscious. Every time I turned a page or shifted in my chair, I felt people glaring at me. In a library, the exhaust of being a person was a problem. Widener was beautiful and ancient, but felt dusty and empty and overly serious, a place to be worshipful, like studying in the catacombs. The last thing I needed was to take myself more seriously.

The places I eventually found, where I most loved to study, were restaurants, coffee shops and cafes. Places like Algiers, the 60 year old Moroccan coffee and tea house on Brattle Street. I would go to the second floor of the vaulted octahedron space, with octagonal tables crowded close and full of other people studying and talking, drinking mint tea.

If it was super late, I went to the all-night diner. It was no-nonsense, not atmospheric, but had enough people alive and awake in the middle of the night to make me feel less like the rapture had come. Sometimes in the early morning, I would walk over to the Dunkin Donuts on JFK with my notebook or a book, get a sweet super creamy coffee, sit at a table, surrounded by the sounds of donuts being stocked and people shambling in for their morning fix. Surrounded by real life.

People enjoying a meal
The mix of sounds, the texture of the air, the way people together make the air feel different.

It was the din I was after, I finally realized—the way in a restaurant or café, my personhood, even my fussiness, contributed to the collective. Talking and clinking, gesturing and fidgeting, music and scribbling, was all part of the din. It wasn’t a zero-sum game. The din created the paradox I was after—it was intimate, and private, within the communal hubbub.

Din refers to sound. But it was more than that. Din is the mix of sounds, but also the texture of the air, the way people concentrated together make the air feel different. The way each of us together in a room is separate, but also blending and bleeding into one another.

The din was why I could study better at Algier’s than the library. The din felt more like home. The din had a way of holding you.

**

Midway through freshman year, I declared a major—Environmental Science and Public Policy. This appealed to my tree-hugger roots—the streak of environmentalism that my mom had inherited from her dad and passed to me. And since I was going to be a surgeon, like my dad, it was helpful that many of ESPP’s requirements crossed over with med school prerequisites.

My sophomore year schedule was stacked with science and math even more than freshman year had been. Bio, earth sciences, organic chemistry, multi-variable calculus. By the end of sophomore year, I would have every pre-req for med school completed except for one. I wasn’t taking any humanities courses other than Justice, sophomore fall. Schoolwork was problem sets, calculations, exams with right and wrong answers graded on a curve, and many hours of lab.

I spent most of my days in the science center. To get there from Lowell House, I walked past the historic Fly Club on the right, crossed Mt. Auburn and the quirky Hasty Pudding Club, wedged in the middle of the street, walked up the slight incline of Linden Street. Then I crossed Mass Ave, entered the Yard, passed its beautiful old brick buildings, exited the far side, crossed a little quadrangle, and arrived at my destination: a behemoth hodge podge of metal and glass. The Science Center was funded by Polaroid Company in the seventies and built to resemble a Polaroid Camera. It was the only ugly building at Harvard.

Sophomore winter was grim. I made the trek early, scrambling over puddles or dirty snowbanks at the margin of sidewalk and street, in the dark. I spent the morning in sunless science lectures. I ate a rubbery chick-filet for lunch in the science center snackbar at a plastic chair on a table topped with plastic laminate. Then, after lunch, there was Bio or Organic Chemistry lab, which lasted for hours.

Bio lab was more fun—we cut things up and looked at them under microscopes. But Orgo lab I dreaded. You had to follow procedures and measurements exactly or you risked screwing your yield—for both you and your lab partner—or possibly causing an explosion. We cleaned every beaker and test tube and flask with ethanol spray, because even invisible contaminations hurt yields. Sterility and perfection were paramount; the work was tedious, boring, and long. And no matter how carefully I worked, my yields were not great.

I would leave lab when the sun had already set, and trudge back across the yard and down to Lowell House, again in the dark. As I had freshman year, I ignored the fact that I preferred the classes that had nothing to do with my major or future career. Everyone knew that premed was a slog, and so was med school, and so was residency. These were things that I just had to get through, hoops that had to be jumped. I was good at hoop jumping; it was part of the plan.

As the days grew longer and warmer, my mood improved. I felt less depressed about having spent the year in the unnatural light of a sterile building I didn’t like. Spring semester came to an end, and my mom was in town to help me pack up my dorm for the summer. I had just one last final to finish—Organic Chemistry.

I stayed up late in my mom’s hotel room, studying for the final the next day. Organic Chemistry second semester was all about writing reaction mechanisms, which I found satisfying. You drew diagrams with arrows and lines to show how electrons jumped and moved, creating intermediary molecules in their progress from one compound to another. That semester we had learned reaction mechanisms for Benzopyrene—the cancer-causing char on meat, for the dangerous toxin in unroasted peanuts, for the biproduct of alcohol metabolism that causes hangovers.

But scattered all around me on the floor where I was studying were fashion and design magazines. I took breaks from studying to pour through them and tear out pages I liked. The wall behind the desk in my room held a growing collage of words and images I had collected. I loved fashion, color, style, jewelry, clothes, accessories, fabric, texture, magazines. But of course these weren’t serious pursuits—just hobbies, or procrastinating.

But it occurred to me, in the small hours that night, and for the first time, that maybe what I always wanted to do instead of my schoolwork—think about color and cut, make collages, read books, dream up ideas—was not something I should feel guilty about, but something I should seriously think about. Maybe it was what I actually wanted to do. And maybe it did matter that I liked my humanities courses more than my science ones.

That night, I considered what it would feel like to be a doctor—the places I would work, the way my days would go, the tasks they would entail. Rather than prerequisite hoops, I wondered if the Science Center, and O Chem lab, were in fact a pretty good sample of what life as a doctor would be like. When I finally arrived at being a doctor—after years of jumping through hoops and slogging it out—wouldn’t I be wearing a boring white coat, working in a warren of small, sunless and antiseptic rooms, scared of making a mistake? Wouldn’t life be pretty similar to the slog?

Banner showing the crest for Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
A gray day on campus.

What I was drawn to in medicine was taking care of people—but there are many ways to do that. And what I started to rebel against was the ugliness of STEM, the plasticky-ness and sterility of its surroundings and its reductive way of looking at the world. I was not a black and white person. I was a slouchy grey boot person.

Larry Summers, the president of Harvard when I was there, got in a lot of hot water, sometime after I graduated, for saying that there might be some sort of neurological explanation for why men seemed to excel in math and science more than women. Perhaps it was innate—women just didn’t have the capacity for high-level, abstract thought. 

I think we can do the math. What we maybe can’t do as well is ignore everything else. We may be more bothered by the context and consequence of our calculations, less able to tolerate the real-world ugliness pure abstraction creates, and to write off its collateral damage in pursuit of progress.

And maybe we can’t concentrate or access our highest powers—our best selves—when we aren’t part of a unit, like a family, or a group of roommates, or in a particular place, that makes us feel safe. Maybe we are more distracted by the world around us because we care more about the world around us, its beauty as much as its productivity, the reality of life in a body, not just a mind.

I stayed up most of the night studying for O Chem. I still wanted to get a good grade on the exam. But some switch had flipped. I knew I didn’t want to be a doctor. I had just never taken the time to think deeply about the plans I had made for myself, or consider if they were what I really wanted. When I finally did, I realized I didn’t want to follow instructions perfectly, fearfully. I wanted a more dynamic life.

I wasn’t sure what that meant, yet. But I was willing to look.

**

Even at Harvard there were moments and places that were subtly, perhaps accidentally, subversive to our plans. Eddies in the stream of to-do lists, caverns in the rock walls of our drive. But since our natural impulse was to fill every moment with some productive activity, the stoop might never have happened if it weren’t for the smokers.

The Stoop
The stoop (not ours, but close.)

The stoop was a wide slab of concrete in front of Weld with little comfort and zero convenience other than the ability to smoke, and so smokers began to congregate there. That’s how it started—as a smoker’s hovel, an accident.

I didn’t smoke, but would go out there for study breaks. Non-smokers would drink soda or pop (depending on which part of the country you were from) eat snacks from the vending machine in the basement, and talk with the smokers.

Soon “stooping it” became a compound verb and the stoop a liminal but protected realm. It was a third place—not home, not work. We had our common room, but the stoop was more democratic, our miniature townsquare. Liz, who started smoking when she studied abroad in Spain, became the de facto mayor.

Each year we got a new stoop depending on where we lived. My favorite was senior year, in the corner of Lowell House, with the stairs in the shade of a blank tree, frontage on the grassy yard, and a view of the dining hall where we could get snacks or drinks to bring back to the stoop.

Work wasn’t forbidden on the stoop—someone might smoke while furiously finishing a paper, minutes from deadline, or casually bring a book—but work wasn’t what the stoop was for, and everyone understood this. The stoop was a micro-rebellion. We went there to not study, we went there to procrastinate. We went there for snacks, nicotine, and to feel less alone. We went there to talk. We talked about break-ups, hookups, crushes, hangovers, makeouts, call backs, absence of callbacks, shady behavior, difficult classes, parties, the fucking finals clubs, and a lot about dudes because dudes at Harvard were a problem that could only be worked out on the stoop.

Hours of hard thinking and only thinking made me feel un-embodied, like an ant crawling around inside my own head, wandering into tunnels and dark places where no creature should venture. That much mind time paradoxically made me feel like I was losing my mind. And so there was the stoop, to feel less like a figment and more like a person.

The stoop was a gap, a space, a carveout, a third place. The stoop was where we reflected. We talked about studying and class, but we didn’t study on the stoop. Mostly we turned our fearsome jacked up analytical minds to everything other than class—boy problems, social grievances, family stuff, and worrying we were spending too much time on the stoop.

But if culture is the processing of human existence, making sense of what happens to us through art, literature, music, but also conversation and reflection about life, art, literature and music, then the stoop was as much a place for culture as the classroom. Culture requires space, perspective, people, friction, breathing room, safety. The stoop had it all.

The stoop was a place for epiphanies and wild imaginings. We talked about how what we were reading related to this other thing we were reading, or to our actual lives. I told Liz my ideas on the stoop, which for some reason had just started pouring out of me all the time. Ideas for businesses, places, fashion companies, outfits, weird paper topics, grandiose philosophies.

I spent weeks worth of time talking to Liz or Leesh on the stoop, or stoop-like places, over the course of four years of college. Sometimes we would go out there for a few minutes, sometimes close to an hour. It just depended—on the weather, on whether we needed it.

There has to be a place outside of the grind where you can get some perspective on the grind.

Often, that perspective feels like procrastination, like a mistake. But maybe it’s what matters most.

We have two parallel lives. There is the life we think we are supposed to have, and that we think we are living—the to-do list, vigorously planned, tightly controlled. This life involves a bunch of shoulds—the money we should have in the bank, the hours of study we should log, the pounds we should weigh, the grades we should get, the career we should have. The person we should be, the direction we are sure the cab should be going. Over-achiever life. Gold star life.

This is theoretical life. It happens almost entirely in our heads. Harvard kids, including me, were all about this life.

But real life is what actually happens to us and who we really are. Real life crashes and burns, soars and floats, leaks out the cracks, has food in its teeth. Real life persists [in revealing itself to us] despite our determination to beat it back behind theoretical life. Real life is random, unexpected, involves happy accidents and shitty ones, breaks your heart and makes you weep, gets lost and then can’t stop laughing. Real life stubs a cigarette butt on theoretical life.

Real life is flawed. Real life, being real, is how we experience every good and beautiful thing—love, and laughter, empathy, and joy.

For most Harvard kids—talented, smart, driven, privileged, supported by families who were also all those things—real life and theoretical life were so closely aligned they seemed to be one. Our lives had gone, for the most part, perfectly according to our plans. For me at least, but I suspect not only me, when I got to Harvard—homesick, coast-sick, and no longer able to define myself in the old ways—the two lives started to pull apart.

The stoop was the crack, and the crack only widened. I wasn’t the person I thought I was.