Niels Joaquin

[Note: Every five years, Harvard asks alumni of the undergraduate College to write an update for the Class Report, which is printed in book form (the “Red Book”). This is the first submission I’ve ever written, for my 20th reunion in June 2027.]

I  skipped our first three opportunities to write a check-in because I was deeply sad about my squandered college experience, and the idea of making any kind of statement to my graduating class, to whom I am almost completely a stranger, intimidated me. No one in the class of ’07 actually knows me. I had severe social anxiety when I was at Harvard, but I didn’t have the self-awareness to even understand what was wrong with me. So throughout college, I just stayed inside and never made friends; I worked two part-time jobs and focused on them much more than on my own classes; I graduated a year early to peace out as soon as the registrar could grant me a degree. I regret so much about that period of my life, and it’s always been hard for me to revisit it.

For the past two decades, I’ve tried to make sense of why I acted the way I did then. And for a long time, bestowing the label of “severe social anxiety” to the circumstances was the primary way that I processed and explained away those years. Then in 2019, I read a book called The Privileged Poor by Anthony Abraham Jack, and it gave me a very different perspective for contextualizing my withdrawal from the world. Yes, anxiety was always a big part of it, but that already terrible problem was compounded by the fact that I hadn’t even learned the basic ways of behaving in a big university.

I quite simply lacked the background for it. I didn’t know what to do in office hours (What is there to talk about?); I didn’t know how to use advisers of any kind (Didn’t counselors just schedule your classes?); I didn’t know how to talk in a weekly section (so I often just stopped going); I never joined study groups because I grew up believing that all schoolwork was supposed to be independent (I was raised to pass written tests with my own brain, so any group work was essentially cheating). Many Harvard alumni attended high schools that implicitly taught them how to operate and get ahead in this environment; these foundations were set long before they passed through Johnston Gate on move-in day, because they were always immersed in the savoir-faire of their family and network. Knowing how to move through the world is a given for them. But all of these norms were foreign concepts, brutally incompatible with me. Whatever strange mix it was of my hometown and my past schools and my resources created the person I was then; I don’t think I could’ve changed that. That’s the person who entered and tumbled through Harvard—a “little soul-toddler,” as Herman Melville describes in Pierre: “now you shall hear his shriek and his wail, and often his fall.”

Some part of me wishes that there had been adults around me who could’ve seen my drowning, could’ve put a name to it and intervened with love. I really needed someone’s help. I was not a healthy person. At the same time, on a global scale I was already a privileged beneficiary, with a golden ticket of admission that so many young people dream of—so expecting a community to somehow teach me fundamental social skills and to give me that much more of a leg up in life already feels foolish.

The further twist is that, as an adult, I’ve organically discovered how much I actually love meeting new people, and putting the world to rights with them, and getting to “suck out all the marrow of life.” This self-knowledge came naturally from making connections in the workplace, and from roaming freely in big cities. I did figure out who I am; I just hate that all of these joyful feelings came so much later. I think I would’ve absolutely loved naïve philosophical discussions in common rooms. Had I been in the right place in life, I would’ve loved to devour everything, to find weirdos like me (Because they’re out there! I’ve found them!), to shed inhibitions and to fail at many youthful experiments, because that’s when you have the luxury of reinvention. I want to be an intellectual omnivore now; I want to learn everything I missed. That whole academic environment is actually perfect for me! But the stained record I left in my haphazard escape from college cut me off from so many paths thereafter.

In an astonishingly personal letter, Melville confessed to Nathaniel Hawthorne in June 1851:

My development has been all within a few years past. I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian Pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould.¹

It’s a jarring sensation to be so in love with life, to feel like I’m finally getting started, but to acknowledge that this is all, more than likely, more than halfway over. This is my only life, which is why having squandered the bounty of Harvard will always hurt when I reflect back on it. But I’m finally able to write with an open heart, unfolding within myself, addressing peers I never met.