Opening My Heart to Open Your Heart

I want to write about something deeply personal. In my last two columns, I have written about the importance of “radical openness.” I have used this term to denote the willingness to compromise in dialogue and the ability to rethink ideologies we hold near to our hearts. Radical openness also refers to the ability to be vulnerable and share an aspect of oneself with another living being. In this column, I want to demonstrate exactly what this looks like.

With that said, I want to discuss my self-doubt and insecurity as an intellectual, feelings I am convinced that most of us at some point experience. It is something that is not talked about much in our community. As Ivy-Leaguers, we position ourselves as highly intellectual—most of us are. But what is glossed over in our posturing is the fact that a great number of us experience moments of insecurity wherein we doubt our purpose and abilities as intellectual contributors to academia and to the world.

Most of my insecurities come from my educational background. I grew up in the Deep South. Birmingham, Alabama is a city whose public education system is failing. I attended a predominantly black public school for my first two-and-a-half years of high school. I transferred from this school to a predominantly white one with hopes of receiving an education that would prepare me for a prestigious university. What I did not realize was that just because the students’ and teachers’ skin color was different did not necessarily mean that they were any more committed to education and learning than those students and teachers at the predominantly black school. Nonetheless, I somehow made it out—I barely graduated due to excessive absences—and was admitted to Columbia.

I was ill-prepared to enroll at this University. I had embarrassingly low SAT scores and the most impressive thing about my application had to have been my ability to achieve reasonably good grades while working full-time at a fast food restaurant. Before Lit Hum, I had never sat down and actually read for hours at a time. It was not until my second semester here that I realized that reading was not entirely about recreation and that it was about ideas and the intellectual fortitude required to engage with them.
My grades here have been mediocre, but I have never been obsessed with grades. I know that my value as an intellectual and as a thinker cannot be measured by a single letter. It was not until I went to Howard University as a visiting student last semester that I received a D on a paper. Although this grade and others like it have caused me to reflect seriously on my writing, I understand that I cannot necessarily look outside of myself for validation in my academic work. My purpose as an intellectual is to think about ideas, challenge them, and come up with counter-ideas to disrupt the complacency engendered by those original ideas. As long as I know that I have done this to the best of my ability, I have learned to be content with myself regardless of the grade I receive.

All of these factors—attending a sub-par high school and receiving both low college entrance exam scores and not-so-impressive grades—contribute to my feelings of self-doubt and insecurity as an intellectual. I am overcoming these insecurities daily by choosing to focus on my critical engagement with class material instead of the letter grades imposed upon me by my professors. I also grow by looking deep within myself to find worth and value instead of looking for others to validate me.
I wrote this column in the spirit of radical openness because I believe that everyone should be open. Think about the impact such widespread openness would have on our community. What if testimonials like mine were to flood the Spec offices? What if these stories were from the valedictorians or the holders of prestigious graduate school fellowships among us? What if next Monday, the Spec published them as a special feature? What would it mean for us as a community to have these stories heard?
Most importantly, some students would begin to understand that they are not alone in their uncertainties. I could have never written this column a couple of years ago because I was too busy trying to appear intelligent and avoiding even the semblance of incompetency. Knowing that there were others like me who doubted their abilities and coped with these feelings would have helped facilitate my growth as an intellectual.

I wrote this column in order to demonstrate my willingness to be vulnerable and to open my heart at a time when so many members of our community spend so much time and energy closing theirs (more to come on this at a later date). My only hope is that I have inspired others to do the same and take up the mantle of openness that makes a loving community possible and the lives within it worth living.

Anthony Kelley is a Columbia College junior majoring in women’s and gender studies. Strength to Love runs alternate Tuesdays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com