2015 was a turning point in my personal and professional life. A few months in Scotland for the European Lawyers Programme. My first Camino de Santiago, something I had dreamed of for fifteen years or more. The beginning of my master’s at Harvard and, together with it, a love story that, even now that it’s over, shaped the way I see everything that came after. It could have been enough for a lifetime, but it was just a year.
Ten years later, here I am in Cambridge again. At Harvard, we do reunions every five years. The first one was wiped out by Covid, so this one couldn’t be missed. I came back with my stories, my experiences, and my entries in the Red Book, where each Alumnus writes a few paragraphs about the person he or she has become. A few paragraphs to sum up a decade. Good luck with that.
People see the brand. Spielberg at commencement. Zuckerberg dropping out. The crowd of Supreme Court justices, U.S. Presidents, entrepreneurs, artists, and enough billionaires to fill a small island. A few will mention the astronomic tuition, the multibillion dollar endowment, and the unfairness of a game where the real goal is getting in, more than getting out. But fewer will tell you what comes with it: the expectations, the all-nighters, and the quiet sense of overachievement that only a Crimson would understand.
I stepped off the plane and a question I know well started circling again. It’s the kind that never fully goes away and slips here and there in what I write, at least in my eyes: “Have I been worthy enough to honor the blessings I’ve received?“
I never cared about competing with others. I know my path is unique, and I am old enough to know that this sentence holds true for everyone. I like to think of us as defined points between alpha and omega. Nobody is like us. Nobody has been. Nobody will be. But competing with myself? That’s another story. One I haven’t finished writing. And each time I come back here, I feel it heavier.
I’ve walked these rooms, these buildings, these cafeterias dozens of times, and each time that question came along. It became a leitmotif, so much so that destiny later handed me another year here as a researcher, just to breathe that air again and make peace with the ghosts of my past.
Today, passing through the Yard to check if the statue of John Harvard was still there, Flannery O’Connor came to mind.
“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.”
And for the first time in a long time, things are finally making sense.
I could see the signal through all the noise, the worth in every wrong turn, and one thing I had missed all along. That question had eroded me for so long that I ended up finding myself in it.
Harvard changed.
My beloved America changed.
But I was the one who changed the most.
Hopefully for good.
Hopefully for good.
