That, I think, is one of the biggest things that prevents social change: an honest misunderstanding of the stakes.

Because this place is not pretend. It is our lives. And it is where we learn the social and professional habits that will one day affect a lot of other people’s lives.

I need to tell you—and I am sure you, many of you, already know; in your guts and on your skin, in your tired bones—that classism, and sexism, and racism and ableism and homophobia don’t offend us. They build up in our bones. They are released every time we crack a joint like poison. They wear us down and down until we think it is better if we do not live.

Harvard, like the rest of the world, has a history and present of all of these things. But here, they wear a fancier disguise. Tradition. History. Prestige.

It is not harmless. It is the dazed mornings; it is the evenings I sobbed into the bath; it is the panic, and then relief, as you wait for a struggling friend to pick up the phone.  

Because it is the performance that get us. The we’re-just-kidding. The you-know-we’re-not-really-sexistracistableisthomophobic. The you-know-we’re-just-having-fun.

If hierarchy and exclusion, if performances of privilege that disallow deep diversity, if putting prestige over people is how we have fun at Harvard, then fuck our fun.

If prestige requires bulldozing people, I don’t want prestige.

But I don’t think it does.

I used to feel all shivery-shuddery, all filled with wild, ragged hope when I walked through Harvard Yard. After a Lamont all-nighter, the pink mist just starting to clear. In the years since, that feeling was replaced by frustration, criticism, rage.

This year, collaborating with you through this column, the old feeling has returned. But it’s different now. Because I realized something.

I realized that the thrill of possibility that used to shake my chest each time I stepped into Harvard Yard was nothing but the beating of my own heart.

And your heart. And all of our hearts. I used to want to take Harvard inside of me, breathing it in so I would be different, changed.

But I don’t think there really is anything magical in the air. I think the really magical thing is our own lungs.

Everything is not okay. Harvard has not divested from fossil fuels, we as a university are still not doing enough to acknowledge and combat racism, our sexual assault policy and practices are messed up, our campus is outrageously class-skewed, and I still feel like crap every time I walk down Mt. Auburn Street on a Saturday night.