Fifteen Minutes Magazine: May 2022

FM FIFTEEN MINUTES

THE MOMENTUM ISSUE

MAY 2022 MAY 2022

FIFTEEN MINUTES

THE MAGAZINE OF THE HARVARD CRIMSON EDITOR’S NOTE

FM CHAIRS

Sophia S. Liang ’23

Maliya V. Ellis ’24

EDITORS-AT-LARGE

Josie F. Abugov ’22-’23

Kevin Lin ’23

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Sarah W. Faber ’24 | Saima S. Iqbal ’23

Tess C. Kelley ’23 | Akila V. Muthukumar ’23

Maya M. F. Wilson ’24 | Rebecca E.J. Cadenhead ’24

Meimei Xu ’24 | Harrison R. T. Ward ’23

WRITERS

Tamar Sarig ’23 | Isabel T. Mehta ’24

Jem K. Williams ’25 | Elyse D. Pham ’22-’23

Talia M. Blatt ’23 | Kya I. Brooks ’25

Michal Goldstein ’25 | Soleil C. Saint-Cyr ’25

FM DESIGN EXECS

Max H. Schermer ’24

Michael Hu ’ 25

Sophia Salamanca ’ 25

FM PHOTO EXEC

Joey Huang ’24

PHOTOGRAPHERS

Julian J. Giordano ’25

Truong L. Nguyen ’23

Ben Y. Cammarata ’25

DESIGNERS

Keren Tran ’23 | Michelle Liu ’24

Julia Freitag ’25 | Yao Yin ’23

PRESIDENT

Raquel Coronell Uribe ’ 23

MANAGING EDITOR

Jasper G. Goodman ’ 23

BUSINESS MANAGER

Amy X. Zhou ’ 23

COVER DESIGN

Madison Shirazi ’ 23

This spring marks the end of a year of homecoming, the return to campus we so eagerly awaited for so long. Two years ago, we were slouching listlessly in our childhood bedrooms, falling asleep in Zoom lectures and watching sourdough rise. By now, though, we’ve plunged back into the rhythms of campus life — cramming for exams, rushing from class to class, hurriedly typing up an editor’s note the day before the magazine is supposed to be sent to the printer …

Life is in full swing again, and to celebrate, the theme of our end-of-year issue is momentum: the strength or force gained by motion or by a series of events. The stories inside are centered around acceleration, impetus, speed. Gears grinding, wheels turning, traction gained. Social movements and cultural tides. Getting back into old grooves and forging new ones. Where we came from and where we’re headed.

But they also deal with the opposite: inertia, resistance, stagnancy; how we might slow down or change course. Momentum, after all, is not always a good thing. Propelled by our breakneck speed of life, rates of depression and anxiety have steadily increased among undergraduates throughout the last decade and surged during the pandemic. So, in our final scrutiny of the semester, our intrepid writer Talia M. Blatt set out to lift the veil on the full range of mental health resources available on campus by trying them out herself. From calling CAMHS to visiting Room 13, she takes a critical look at campus mental health infrastructure to see what’s working and what’s not, and ultimately imagines a more universal mosaic of care, one that might help us all chart new paths and help our friends do the same.

As we head off for sun-soaked mornings and lazy afternoons, we hope you’ll keep up the momentum, all the energy and optimism that came with traditions resumed and friendships renewed. But we encourage you to interrogate it, too — to reflect on how far you’ve come and examine the journey ahead. To pause, to breathe, to rest. As for us, we will be taking a long summer’s nap.

Until next time, MVE & SSL

the battle for mass ave

TAMAR SARIG

A cyclist rides through a protected bike lane in Harvard Square. Photo by Truong L. Nguyen.

Asilent fight is unfolding within the storefronts of Massachusetts Avenue. On a short walk from the Quad to the Porter T stop, at least a dozen posters hanging in shop windows accuse the City of Cambridge of planning to “give away Porter Square.”

The signs, distributed by a group called Porter Square Safety For All, have gone up over the past several months in opposition to a city plan that might seem like a crowd-pleaser: the construction of separated bike lanes along the entirety of Mass Ave.

In 2019, citing the need to “eliminate fatalities and injuries on City streets” and promote

environmentally friendly transportation, the Cambridge City Council passed the Cycling Safety Ordinance, which requires the construction of 22.6 miles of new separated bicycle lanes by May 2026. The law and its amendments, which expanded the project to encompass all of Mass Ave., have highlighted the difficulties of urban planning and transportation improvements in a city where street space is a precious and limited commodity.

Opposition to the bike lane project largely comes from local business owners, who worry that the proposal will eliminate crucial parking spaces and thus drive down business. The Cycling Safety Ordinance leaves open several possible ways for the city to meet the bike lane requirement, including “quick-build bike lanes” (which separate cyclists from cars using temporary posts) and “construction” or “partial build” methods (which involve digging up the street to create a more permanent reconfiguration).

If the city fails to approve a construction timeline by April 30, the Ordinance requires the installation of quick-build lanes in the area surrounding Porter Square — a solution that, in some parts of the road, would remove virtually all curbside parking and loading spaces.

Charlie H. Bassile, the owner of Charlie’s Barbershop near Porter Square, worries that it will be “almost impossible to survive” such a sharp reduction in parking spots. Throughout his roughly twenty years of owning a business in Cambridge, Bassile says, parking shortages have posed a consistent challenge. He feels that the city has rushed to a solution that will drastically reduce public

access to his own business and others.

“I’ve been investing in that neighborhood for 30 years,” Bassile says. “I’m 55 years old now. I mean, for me to take my business somewhere else at this age — it’s almost impossible.”

Small businesses’ need for parking spaces has come into conflict with competing city interests: promoting road safety and encouraging more sustainable forms of travel. Chris A. Cassa, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and a volunteer with Cambridge Bike Safety, says he and others were drawn to cycling advocacy because of firsthand experience with the “stress” and “close calls” of biking on unprotected Cambridge streets. According to Cambridge Bicycle Safety, first responders attend to around 160 bicycle crashes each year.

“There are many, many people in Cambridge who have expressed that they’d love to bike more, but they just don’t feel safe,” Cassa says. Bike ridership has steadily increased in Cambridge for several decades and surged over the course of the pandemic, but according to Cassa, city planning hasn’t kept pace with residents’ changing lifestyles.

“The road design of Mass. Ave was made a really long time ago,” Cassa says, “and cities evolve and need to grow and need to reflect the uses of people that want to use the road.”

Makayla L. Comas, the community engagement manager at Livable Streets Alliance, agrees that separated bike lanes are a necessary adaptation for a city whose residents increasingly rely on bikes.

“People are biking, and that is

just how folks in more urban areas are getting around these days,” Comas says. According to her, the remaining question is how to make these cyclists safer while meeting the needs of other groups.

It’s easy to interpret the controversy over the bike lane proposal as a black-and-white battle between two opposing camps — business owners on one side, cyclists on the other. But a closer look at the landscape of Mass Ave. and the city at large reveals a much more nuanced problem. Somerville resident John R. Pecchia, for example, straddles the divide: as the owner of Get In Shape For Women, a local personal training studio, and a cyclist himself, he personally feels both the benefits and drawbacks of the proposal.

“My happy medium, personally, would be to still be able to see the bike lanes come in and become a better opportunity for bicyclists and pedestrians and automobiles,” Pecchia says. But he worries that the quick-build option will make his gym less accessible to out-oftown customers, and he feels that Cambridge hasn’t fully considered the potential burden on shops already reeling from the Covid-19 pandemic.

“I think a lot of the other businesses feel a little burned,” Pecchia says, “feeling like they’re just getting out of that hump, and now they’re going to have to try and pivot and then figure out how to navigate this extra chapter.”

Facing this complex intersection of needs, a group of Cambridge residents, business owners, and cycling advocates have banded together in an effort to promote a compromise. Mass Ave for All represents a local coalition arguing for a “partial

build” option: removing the median from the center of Mass Ave. to make room for permanent bike lanes while maintaining about half the current street parking. The group’s website argues for a shift in priorities on Mass Ave. — away from private vehicle throughput and toward “safety for people traveling by public transportation, foot, or bicycle.”

For Cassa of Cambridge Bike Safety (which has supported Mass Ave for All’s proposal), this marks a crucial shift.

The coalition, Cassa says, is focused on “making Mass Ave. just a nicer place to be, and not just being a regional highway for cars, and turning it into a place that people want to visit.” He points out that business owners often assume most of their customers arrive by car, when in reality, city data shows that only a third of Porter Square shoppers drive there — the rest are pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders.

City Councilor and former Mayor Marc C. McGovern, who has advocated for protected bike lanes, believes that proactive communication and mitigation efforts from the city are key to building bridges between these various groups.

“That will alleviate a lot of the anxiety people have, if we say, ‘Look, we’re taking away 50 parking spaces, but we’re adding 30 of them back,’” McGovern says. This could be a real option, he explains, if the city leases private parking spaces and offers them to the public. “Everybody is going to have to give a little something to make this work,” he adds.

Comas agrees that building trust between the city government and the public will be crucial to resolving the Mass Ave. bike lane

debate, as well as other road safety efforts in the future.

“If we, as a region, are going to push for affordable and sustainable transportation methods, planners also need to create community buy-in,” Comas says. “And there was no community buy-in, in particular from the loudest bit of the community, which was the business owners.”

Public controversy notwithstanding, the Cycling Safety Ordinance is settled law. Whether or not the city reaches a compromise on construction, protected bike lanes of some kind will be built along Mass Ave. in the next several years. Along less controversial sections of the road, 2.6 miles have already been installed. Still, many advocates on all sides agree that the tensions over the proposal reveal important lessons for the future.

“This is a way to really transform the urban corridor into something that works better for everyone, and people most efficiently,” Cassa says, “not just people in cars.”

McGovern agrees that Cambridge is at a turning point, with decision-makers rethinking the purpose of the city’s main artery.

“Cities are living, breathing things. They change, they evolve,” McGovern says. “The Cambridge of today isn’t the Cambridge of 20 years ago, or 40 years ago, and that’s okay. That’s what vibrant cities do.”

Dear Freshman Year

Dear freshman year

MICHAL GOLDSTEIN

Dear Freshman Year,

I cautioned myself from meeting you with high expectations. I had done too much of that already. Graduating high school in 2020 amid a pandemic, I learned to lower my standards.

For months, I had secretly dreamed about the adrenaline of you. Of stepping onto campus as a student for the first time and knowing that it belonged to me — that it was mine to explore and to mold. Of rushing to class with a book in my hand like the main character in a movie. Of decorating my dorm room, of running by the Charles River, of staying up late to talk to friends about topics that only come up at two in the morning.

But during my gap year, my excitement for you melded with an intimidating feeling of uncertainty. I had always derived my happiness from looking forward: to weekend hikes with friends, to slices of pumpkin cheesecake on Thanksgiving, to the first fateful day with you. Then suddenly my predictions came to a screeching halt. When I tried imagining the future, I simply drew a blank.

I told myself not to rely on you. I told myself that I wouldn’t believe in you until I had flown across the country and met you in person. We played the long game. And eventually you did show up, your arms wide open.

In our first week together, I felt like a newborn child opening my eyes for the very first time. Everything fascinated me. I was blown away by the way the light hit the stained glass windows of Annenberg and the glistening chandelier above the marble steps of Widener. The way people played frisbee in the yard and laid on the grass, soaking up the sun and savoring the end of summer. I remember waking up early just to have time to look out my window and take you in.

In our first month, I became close to people faster than I ever knew I could. I would look around at my friends and think, “How have I spent so many Septembers not knowing you? What did my life even look like before you came into it?”

That was always the comparison: life before you and life after you. I could not fathom how much had changed. I had gone from a year of stillness and solitude to the most socially and intellectually

stimulating experience of my life. And that was only the beginning.

That fall, you brought me to football games, woke me up for 8:15 a.m. breakfast with entrymates, took me to Jefe’s at its busiest hours, and danced with me through Zumba at Hemenway. You watched my roommates and I topple over each other in the bathroom while getting ready for John Harvard’s Bar Mitzvah and cry from laughter over spilled Brita water and free couches that wouldn’t fit through our door.

a new one. Your first few months were an extended housewarming party.

The days were long and the weeks were short. Winter break came far too quickly and the goodbyes felt rushed and unfair. I could barely understand the way time was playing out in my life — I was leaving for six weeks and I had

exactly how to live my second semester. What to prioritize, who to spend time with, how to stay balanced.

The distance was good for us. But the start of the new year was not.

We no longer needed to try to make a good impression on each other; we no longer skimmed the surface. You showed me my friends’ flaws and revealed mine.

First semester had this untouchable kind of magic. Friends left Tatte croissants on my desk with notes that said things like, “My love, I know you crushed it … I bet they took that psych exam out in a body bag.”

I spent so much time talking to people that I started setting timers for when I’d finally start my work, naturally ignoring them once they went off. College was beginning to feel like home, but it was still

only known my friends for twice that period. I was afraid of the slowness of home, afraid I would miss the bustle and liveliness of college more than I could handle. Break turned out to be a long exhale. I finally had the time to think and process the past few months. When I returned to you in January, I expected to know

The first few weeks back, your imperfections set in at last. We no longer needed to try to make a good impression on each other; we no longer skimmed the surface. You showed me my friends’ flaws and revealed mine. You disappointed me. Friends disappointed me. I disappointed myself. I was furious with you. When I met you, I thought I could leave behind my previous anxieties and struggles and start anew. Instead, you brought them out and let them follow me. Life before you seeped into life after you.

You weren’t flawless. But you showed up. One day after another. In those moments of chaos — when I had overcommitted

Photos courtesy of Michal Goldstein.

myself, when I hadn’t slept well in days, when I thought I’d severed bonds that couldn’t be mended — you persisted. You showed me a different magic: one I could trust.

Freshman year, I loved all of you: your best and worst. I miss your euphoric summer and reflective fall, I miss your winter and the snow that melted before I was ready for it to go. I even preemptively miss your spring, which simultaneously breathes

new life into the air and leaves me feeling unsettled. This week, the Yard exploded with pink blossoms and sunshine and I gazed out at it bittersweetly — the two of us are nearing our end.

I want to take my time saying goodbye.

I want to thank you properly. For what you’ve given me and for what you have left in store. For the long nights drinking tea with my best friends, for

the irresponsible excitement for monthly improv shows, for the many inside jokes. Most of all, for this new, unexpected, and magical life that you’ve granted me.

Yours, Michal

Photos courtesy of Michal Goldstein.

WHEN THE BODY MEETS THE MIND

It feels strange to start my day so early, at about 5 a.m., because my body takes longer to wake up than my mind does. I am remarkably alert in the morning, but I have to force my legs to pedal my bike through a waking Cambridge, down to the boathouse for practice. I pass service workers in uniform waiting for the bus on Brattle Street and imagine that they may be going to work, or returning home after the night shift.

There is nothing special about this morning routine. It is ordinary to me — everything that I am doing and everything that I am about to do. As we row, it’s a push and a catch, a push and a catch. Within minutes, my body finally catches up. It is so cold. The wind stimulates my nervous system, and suddenly there is a sort of unity between what I want to do and what I am doing. There is nothing else to do other than insert my blade in the water and push.

We push, with our bodies, all the way up the river. If we stopped moving, the boat would stop moving, too. It is a wonderful feeling, to know that my body is strong and capable. I focus on my feet, flat on the footplate, and then the engagement of my thighs, which press once the blade is locked. There is a tug on my latissimus muscles and, at the end of the stroke, an activation

of my abdominals as they hold my body upright. My grip on the oar handle is secure. I am intensely aware of my body and its contractions and releases and its relation to other bodies in front of and behind me.

The river opens up about 2,000 meters downriver from Weld Boathouse. Rowers call it the Basin. In the Basin, the Boston skyline sits on the horizon atop Longfellow Bridge. The sky is mostly gray until the sun rises. Then, the horizon glows a pale yellow just before it burns red, or maybe calms with orange and pink. The industrial architecture is first unveiled by a pale light, and the distance afforded to me, on the river, allows for the fleeting feeling that nothing is complicated and moments can just be appreciated as aesthetic experiences.

Two hours later, I’m sitting in the middle row for my 9 a.m. English class. It feels like all that I experienced earlier this morning happened somewhere else. In class, we are reading Charles Dickens’s “Bleak House.” This is the longest novel I have ever read and also one of the most complicated. I am handed a passage from the novel and told to take the next 15 minutes to perform a close reading. The passage is only four sentences.

“For a time there were some dungeon lights burning, as the lamp of life hums in Tom-all-Alone’s, heavily, heavily, in the

Isabel T. Mehta

nauseous air, and winking — as that lamp, too, winks in Tom-all-Alone’s — at many horrible things,” reads one of them.

A close reading is not merely reading. It’s a thoughtful and critical analysis of a text in order to develop a deep and

because it requires intense stillness and focus. It is difficult for me to summon such isolated attention on command, because most other things in my life do not require this of me. It all becomes beautiful quickly — the repetition, the rhythm, Dickens’s precise

precise understanding of the text’s form in relation to its significance. It is an inspection done by slowing down time to be present with the text. Each word is enthroned with enough power to bear the weight of its paragraph. I find this process one of the hardest tasks in studying literature,

use of language. I decipher. Push and catch, push and catch. I have learned to define inner peace not as stillness in the body, necessarily, but as stillness in the mind. This seems like a rudimentary concept. We all chuckle at “mindfulness.” I do not know if this is what I am talking

about. What I do know is that there is immense value in being present, and being aware of the body and mind, and knowing when one needs rest and the other needs movement. Rowing and studying literature are only different in the physical activity required. What begins to happen when I allow my mind and my body to unify, or become one, repeatedly, everyday, is that both become easy. The world becomes saturated with intrigue and beauty because I am aware enough to see it.

Graphic by Keren Tran.

11

MAROONED IN MAYFIELD

bikes in Mayfield, the neighborhood across the street, but I had grown bored with the perfectly flat and familiar roads on my side. I wanted an adventure

I could see it sloping downward. That was the main reason I chose it. I wanted to be able to glide down, but my 11-year-old brain didn’t think to look far

Jem K. Williams

Graphic by Michelle Liu.

enough ahead to see the road was a dead end. I was barreling toward it, but I hadn’t given up hope just yet.

Gripping my handle bars, I pushed the right side forward in an effort to direct myself around the culde-sac. But it was in vain, and the abrupt change tipped my bike on its side. I felt the moment that my leg made contact with the asphalt, but the bike kept moving.

I closed my eyes and waited for it to be over. Seconds passed like minutes as I gathered the strength to pull my head off the ground. My brother, not far behind and with a more adequate grasp of how his braking system worked, rushed over to help me. The road behind me was streaked with blood and tiny bits of flesh — ripped from my leg to reveal the white fat underneath.

My brother picked me up off the ground and kept me from crying on the painstakingly long walk home, distracting my mind with made-up lyrics to a generic tune. I stayed strong because I knew if I broke down crying, he might cry too.

He got me home — where I was reprimanded by my grandmother and had to bear the sizzling of hydrogen peroxide on my skin. I don’t know what I would have done without him.

There were very few moments growing up when my brother and I were on the same team. I could never drop my guard around him before. I never cried in front of him for fear of ridicule. But this was one of those moments that revealed that we would always have each other’s backs — even if we didn’t say it.

I often play this moment back in my head, particularly when I miss him. It’s often in conjunction with a memory of how cruel or dismissive I was of him in comparison. I never realized growing up that I had a built-in best friend.

Now he’s off at the University of South Carolina, in his third year. He has his own apartment with a year-long lease. And last month, over the phone, he casually commented that he might not be coming home for summer.

That’s when it struck me — this summer could potentially be the last time we live together. He has grown up. We both have. Now it’s almost time for him to graduate, move out, and move on with his life.

It jolted me into the present, into the realization that I’m growing up as well. I’ve gone off to college, and I’m slowly inching closer and closer to leaving my home behind, too. It’s hard to not see the people

you grew up with. I have so many great memories with my brother, and I’m afraid that there won’t be more of them in the future.

There’s nothing I can do to change the past. I can’t go back and not be a brat to my mother. I can’t go back and not fight with my brother. The only way now is forward.

Now begins the test of bonds. The test of whether or not I’ll lose a friendship 18 years in the making. And I’m scared that I’ll fail. I’m scared of how different things are now. I’m scared of the continuous change that I’m going through. I’m scared to even be writing all this out.

I feel like I’m still standing in front of that fence — watching everybody else run free, trying to distract myself from the pain. But this time, my brother isn’t here to help me get up and move on. So, I’m stuck clinging to this summer and the other ones long gone by — clinging to the memories of my family all under one roof. But whether I’m ready for it or not, time keeps moving.

a nostalgiasoaked summer

Iwas lying in bed at the Westin Pasadena when the reality of my upcoming summer sank in. The setting was perfect for a revelation of impending loneliness; it had two beds and was way too big for just me and contained no signs of life besides my makeup strewn on the bathroom counter. The cousins I was living with sometimes got a free room with their Marriott points, just to use the hotel pool. They told me I might as well stay and enjoy the quiet. I couldn’t pass up the easy romanticism of a solo night in a nice hotel.

After they left, I logged onto my virtual internship, which ran from the disorienting hours of 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. three days a week. For the other two days, I worked in-person at an Asian American film production company — the gig that had landed me in LA for the summer. I imagined my best friends pregaming in New York, playing the Nicki remix of “Best I Ever Had” and rotating through endless outfit permutations. We’d all lived together for the past year, and I’d underestimated the buoyancy of knowing that hours alone would always be balanced by hours of booling. Now, I was stuck in a sterile hotel room in a sprawling city with very few proximate friends nearby.

The next morning, I braved the 45-minute journey to Beverly Hills for the purpose of spending $13 on frozen yogurt, navigating LA’s notorious highways even though I’d only gotten my driver’s license a month ago. My jitteriness demanded that I be on the move. I cruised along Mulholland Drive with an invigorating ease; I belted the Olivia Rodrigo album. I started to think that summer might be okay after all.

Then I promptly dented a parked car. When I asked my parents for advice, they misunderstood what happened and told me not to leave a note. I soon realized that I may have committed a hit-and-run. On the road back to Pasadena, I cried a dangerous amount for someone who clearly did not know how to drive. ***

When I’m on the Silver Lake portion of Sunset Boulevard at dusk, I feel like I’m walking through a photograph. Leaving the strip mall with the sushi place and Van Leeuwen’s ice cream, I know I’ll hit Intelligentsia Coffee if I keep going for 15 minutes. At the famous Sunset Junction, the photograph’s waffled, yellowing edges will come into focus, and I’ll have to turn back to keep soaking in sepia-toned nostalgia.

I’ve always been a sentimental person; places are easily inflected with visceral associations of what once happened there and haunted by the specter of who I was in those moments. The sentimentality can sometimes be selfish. LA is a city of nearly 4 million people; I’ve spent maybe half a year there. Still, that street and the hills and the reservoir feel arrested in my memory, like they only exist for me.

My nostalgia is forged through a flurry of memories, but here’s the one I think it hinges on: the weekend before high school graduation, I went to LA on my first ever trip with friends. We met up with my debate friend from Silver Lake at the strip mall for sushi; I’d had a crush on him years ago, but being platonically close now made me feel chill and mature compared to my pining younger self. After dinner, streaks of pink and orange blossomed

Graphic by Michelle Liu.

Elyse D. Pham

over the silhouetted buildings on Sunset — a classic LA postcard. I remember being intoxicated by independence and youth and this new person I could sense myself becoming. I was on the precipice of collegiate reinvention, and already I was the kind of girl who could jaunt around a cool city like LA. It was a feeling I knew I’d be chasing forever.

Since that trip, I kept returning to LA, and often to Silver Lake. I clocked nights of debauchery there — before a beach bonfire, on New Year’s Eve — when alcohol was still tinged with novelty. My roommates and I lived in an adjacent neighborhood for three months over our pandemic gap year.

Last summer, I returned because of my burgeoning interest in entertainment. I always loved who I was in LA; the city seemed to mark clear periods of growth, the backdrop of the comingof-age movie that I believed to structure my life. But this time around, endless time alone replaced collective effervescence. My relationships to people there had changed, as they do; I was working instead of freely roaming.

If Silverlake was a photograph, I was no longer the girl who took it. Still, returning to LA made me fixated on her, and on the people who had preserved the city so beautifully in her memory. ***

My cousin told me that I needed to make friends. He advised me to break into the “Asian scene” or join a girl squad at a pilates class. We both knew I never would. I was famously not a “chiller”; I wanted to be engulfed by relationships with people who deeply understood me. If I couldn’t have that, I would lean into the summer’s loneliness — which operates in a sneaky

symbiosis with sentimentality. My job didn’t start till 3 p.m., so I often drove alone from Pasadena to the trendy Eastside cafes I used to frequent. Those excursions served as a time machine. I didn’t have to forge new meanings out of LA; I could just remember the old ones, and that was enough.

A month into my stay, my cousin summoned his niece and nephew from Orange County to hang out with me. Evidently, my routine was so untenable that it required intervention. Both were new to LA, and I was designated as their tour guide.

For brunch, we shared the Instagram-famous ricotta toast at Sqirl, a quintessential Silver Lake cafe. We talked about Brian’s romantic situation and whether Kaitlyn should quit college swimming and my absurd creative project. We didn’t bare our souls to each other, but I was reminded of how refreshing it can be to approach people without context, purely as the selves that we are now.

It was a sunny day, and fleetingly, my mind wandered to the butterflies of hope and excitement I’d felt a few weeks before that had since deteriorated. But then Kaitlyn took a picture of our lattes for her fledgling foodie Instagram account, and the sun and red stucco and matcha-ontap zapped back into focus, out of the past and into the concretely vibrant present.

***

Two months later, during my last week in LA, I discovered a new level of porousness to the world and learned just how saturated the world could become in return. I had spontaneously given someone a handwritten letter — a letter that was, in retrospect, the most circuitous emotional confession ever written. Still, the

vulnerability of putting thoughts on paper for another person to read startled me. I hadn’t done anything like it before, and I was surprised to learn that I could. When I pulled the haphazardly folded papers from my pocket, it was like handing over years worth of tenderness — the parts of my interiority that I never dreamt could be entrusted to the care of someone else. I immediately got into my Prius, turned on SZA, and drove off.

What was once a high-stakes obstacle course were now wellworn terrain. As I drove from Silver Lake to Santa Monica, I understood that every cliché about opening yourself up to someone was true: I felt wonderfully, liberatingly naked. A constitutive element of nostalgia is that it’s always being created. So maybe, when I return to LA, the route along the I-10 will be inextricable from a euphoric emotional intensity. But in that moment, it felt so vivid that it had to be singular. I couldn’t imagine feeling this specific way again. I didn’t want to. The idea that the drive could fade into another source of nostalgia — something to be inorganically recreated — seemed far-fetched and silly.

Traffic clogged the I-10, and I wondered what I looked like to the people in the cars around me. My eyes were puffy. Snot ran down my lips. I wasn’t crying because of what the letter actually said, or what I might not get in return, but because I was overwhelmed by the sheer power of what I had the capacity to feel. I laughed then, in the middle of a vast, crowded highway, amongst so many strangers who had maybe once felt this inarticulable mess of feelings, too.

THERAPIZE ME?

TALIA M. BLATT

“Ithink you should consider seeking therapy,” I said to a friend, midway through a conversation that would end disastrously.

We were sitting on the couch in our common room, like we did most nights. It was late; I was tired. The pauses between beats in our conversation lengthened into heavy silences, disturbed by the occasional hallway door slammed shut.

She was struggling with anxiety related to a problem that would likely persist for the next month, one beyond either of our abilities to fix. I cycled through the usual, trite suggestions: getting more sleep, taking it easy with work, talking with her family. All were summarily dismissed. Finally, I suggested therapy because I couldn’t think of any other way to help her.

Immediately she grew reticent and eventually visibly angry. She accused me of implying that she was incapable of managing her own problems. I was aggressive and uncompromising in disabusing her of this notion, which I saw as internalized stigma toward mental health. “Other people can get therapy,” she insisted, “but it’s not for me.” We didn’t get anywhere.

Eventually she got to the root of what upset her: She believed that I had suggested therapy because I felt burdened by her emotions. “I’ll stop talking about this,” she offered — the opposite of what I wanted. But that conversation would be one of the last times she opened up to me about her mental health. It marked the inflection point in a gradual distancing.

My impulse to suggest therapy has haunted me ever since. I recommended therapy to her without any idea of what it would entail: how long it might take her to get it, what treatment she could receive from Harvard, if it would be effective. I only knew that she shouldn’t be ashamed to talk about it.

We had lived together for months before the pandemic, Zoomed everyday during it, and lived together after. Now, she has stopped speaking to me entirely.

It makes me wonder: What kind of care do we owe our peers? How do the lines between peer and caregiver blur? And on Harvard’s campus, what does it look like to get help?

At this point, we know beyond a doubt: The kids are not alright.

Over the past few decades, mental health problems, especially among young people, have

Graphic by Yao Yin.

reached epidemic levels. As Howard E. Gardner ’65 and Wendy Fischman, two researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, write in their new book “The Real World of College,” mental health is the defining issue on college campuses, and it has been for the last 10 years.

Rates of depression, anxiety, and serious suicidal ideation among college students have doubled over the last decade. A 2020 report authored by Harvard’s Task Force on Managing Student Mental Health found that from 2014 to 2018, the percentage of undergraduates who said they struggled with depression jumped from 22 percent to 31 percent, and for anxiety, from 19 percent to 30 percent. Only 34 percent of students reported feeling comfortable seeking professional help for emotional problems. (The report names several issues likely contributing to poor mental health, including overwork, loneliness, competitive extracurricular activities, imposter syndrome, and stigma against seeking help.)

Nationwide, the Covid-19 pandemic only increased this burden — which hasn’t lessened even though pandemic restrictions have eased. The Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics’s recent Youth Poll reports that more than half of young people continue to experience feelings of depression and hopelessness, with no statistical differences based on age, race, or ethnicity.

At Harvard, Counseling and Mental Health Services is the Harvard University Health Services division devoted

to providing mental health support and resources. But some students have taken to social media and publications to decry CAMHS’s failures to meet student needs.

A recent post on Harvard Confessions, an anonymous student Facebook forum, details the agonizing process of trying to find a therapist through CAMHS: “It has been the most frustrating, confusing process to get one. I have tried all their services meanwhile but every single interaction has been awful… I’m tired of this process, I just want help.” While I can’t corroborate the experience of the source, the post is representative of broader antiCAMHS social media discourse. At a 2018 town hall, following an incident in which the Cambridge Police Department arrested a Black Harvard student in need of mental health care, students upset with long wait times demanded CAMHS hire more therapists; in March of this year, The Crimson reported that the wait time for new patients to book an appointment was about six weeks.

Students have also alleged that CAMHS is not racially diverse enough in its staffing and resources. In 2015, just one quarter of CAMHS counselors were people of color, prompting Black students organizing for social change to

Counseling and Mental Health Services is the Harvard University Health Services division devoted to providing mental health support and resources. Photo by Julian J. Giordano.

demand the “expedited hiring of more Black and Brown counselors.” Last year, following a rise in anti-Asian violence nationwide, CAMHS faced backlash over its “Anti-Asian Racism Resources” page, which told Asian American students that “you may wish that you weren’t Asian, but remember that your ancestors likely went through similar or even worse incidents.”

Despite these criticisms, students are, at least in my experience, still quick to recommend seeking CAMHS or trying therapy in general. Over meals and brain breaks, in common rooms and libraries, I’ve heard CAMHS offered as a next step. Discussion around therapy on campus rarely extends past this, rendering CAMHS either a scapegoat or a catch-all solution for anyone struggling. This obscures the actual process of obtaining therapy, as well as the full range of mental health infrastructure on campus — let alone what the future of mental health care could or should look like.

Before writing this piece, I had never been to therapy myself, nor had I ever felt like I needed it — but I had recommended it to other people, like my friend. While I have my share of social and academic challenges, I am fortunate in that I haven’t been affected severely by mental health issues. As a consequence, it occurred to me that I would only think to seek mental health resources for myself when I imminently needed them, at which point the resources might be too little, too late.

In an effort to lift the veil on mental health infrastructure on campus, I went through all the steps of seeking support

— CAMHS, private therapy, peer therapy organizations, and broader spirituality and wellness oriented spaces — to comprehensively evaluate the full network of care available. (I went through the motions of obtaining resources that were zero-sum, like CAMHS and private therapy, but did not actually use them, lest I be taking them away from someone who needed them.)

The irony in this project is that I could only go through all these steps of seeking care because I was mentally well enough to try and had the time to dedicate to it, which is likely not the case for many students. I also can’t represent students struggling with severe mental illness through my own experiences, nor is that my intention. I am just one person, but I believe my efforts can help illuminate what it takes to get mental health care and what that care actually looks like in practice.

In addition to taking a critical eye to current resources, I also sought students and faculty who have visions of what the future of therapy, and mental health care more broadly, might look like on campus. What would accessible, meaningful, comprehensive mental health care at Harvard entail? How can our existing services be used in concert to provide a more tailored safety net for students? And what responsibility does the University have in providing this network of care?

To evaluate existing resources, I started with what many students see as the first line of defense: CAMHS. CAMHS provides one-on-one counseling, as well as workshops, listicle-style advice, and referrals

to local therapists. As per its mission statement, CAMHS aims to “respond quickly and in proportion to the student’s or administrator’s expressed need” and “collaborate with the student to create and implement a plan that allows for increased perspective, growth and a return to a level of functioning most likely to promote success at Harvard.”

As of March, CAMHS employed 36 clinicians trained to offer a variety of treatments, from trauma-informed therapy to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a form of talk therapy meant to help the patient identify and respond to inaccurate or negative patterns of thinking. CBT is used for anxiety, depression, and insomnia, some of the most common conditions that affect students.

This past fall, over 3,000 students had clinical appointments with CAMHS. In July of 2021, CAMHS also launched CAMHS Cares, a 24/7 support line for students who needed urgent care. During the pandemic, as demand for therapy rose, the support line was receiving hundreds of calls a month.

To make a CAMHS

appointment, Harvard students must go through the HUHS portal and book a phone consultation.

It takes me an embarrassingly long period of clicking to get to this booking portal — I only use HUHS about once a year to upload my immunization forms.

After specifying that I’m not a varsity athlete, I reach the mental health question:

“In a few words, let us know your concern [30 char limit]”

I start typing “In the last few weeks” and realize the severity of the limit. It seems impossible to fit anything detailed or cogent in the response box. I decide to leave it at “anxiety and stress.”

But when I try to book a consultation, the earliest one available is on May 3, and the earliest I can feasibly make is on May 5: three weeks away. And that’s just the consultation — presumably there would be another intervening period between the consultation and actually receiving therapy. Most of the things on my mind — the housing lottery, final assignments, summer deadlines — would have to be resolved well before then. I would be lucky if I got therapy

before the end of the semester.

I close out the tab.

For me, this long wait time was a nuisance; for others, it can be a serious barrier to accessing needed care.

After struggling with “lots of anxiety” throughout freshman year, Lauren V. Marshall ’22 tried to get a CAMHS appointment at the beginning of her sophomore year. She made an appointment through the CAMHS portal online, but their earliest availability was a month or two away — and again, that was just for the consultation.

“I thought it would be the first appointment,” she says. “They didn’t make that clear.”

After her consultation, CAMHS connected her with a therapist, but then Covid-19 happened, and that resource evaporated. A year later, when she came back to campus, Marshall finally contacted the therapist.

Even then, she decided to stop after only a few appointments. Her therapist, likely using some form of CBT, expected a lot from her, she says. It was a style of therapy she didn’t believe was benefiting her. “I’m not good at asking for help, and the therapist put that burden on me,” she says. She feels an irony in this: “My stress was having too much to do. If the solution is doing more stuff, that’s not ideal,” she says. She sought therapy for her stress, but the time-consuming, bureaucratic process of getting it only added to that stress, and the form of the therapy wasn’t compatible with her needs.

According to Barbara Lewis, the chief of CAMHS, the average number of CAMHS appointments a patient receives is about four, suggesting that even for students

who do score an appointment, CAMHS therapy is not a longterm solution.

Lewis is explicit about this, describing CAMHS as “shortterm solutions focused,” although students are not automatically assigned the same number of appointments. According to the CAMHS website, “Some students feel benefits after one to six sessions, others need more time.”

But Lewis says she’s “not content” with wait times and overall student satisfaction, and that CAMHS is working on implementing the recommendations of the 2020 Mental Health Task Force. She also emphasizes the success and low wait times of the CAMHS Cares line.

“Just talking to someone in that moment staves off a crisis,” she says. (Personally, I didn’t try the hotline, as part of my commitment to not using zero-sum resources.)

CAMHS does offer same-day urgent appointments for students in crisis, as well. “If students need to be seen in-person, we will get them in,” Lewis says.

But for non-urgent cases — anyone in mild to moderate distress, like me — you can’t count on getting a CAMHS appointment quickly, trying to get one is itself taxing, and there’s no guarantee that the care will be quite what you need. It’s a familiar refrain: If Harvard has so much money, why don’t we just hire more therapists?

To get an answer to this, I spoke with Steven E. Hyman, a biology professor who served as the University provost from 2001 to 2011. He also led the National Institute of Mental Health from

Located in the Smith Campus Center, CAMHS has been criticized by students for having wait times of up to six weeks. Photo by Julian J. Giordano.

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A 2004 investigation by The Crimson found that almost half of Harvard undergraduates had experienced depression that inhibited their daily function, prompting students to criticize the inadequate supply of mental health resources.

stands at $1,304 for the 2022-2023 academic year, a marginal increase from the last few years.

Under this funding structure, the cost of hiring more therapists could come directly out of students’ pockets. “There was a concern about the total cost to students who were healthy,” Hyman says. “It’s just really hard to free up money internally.”

Lewis suggests CAMHS is looking for other sources of funding, but she would not elaborate on what these might be.

Since Hyman’s years as provost, shortages have persisted, and reports show student mental health has deteriorated — trends the pandemic only exacerbated.

much-needed services. “People would come to us asking us to support screening campaigns,” Hyman remembers, referring to preventative mental health diagnoses. “I would say, you know, it’s great, but what if somebody screens positive? Do you actually have a place for them to get help? Or are you screening people into the void?”

With CAMHS a long way off, I wanted to see if outside therapy was a feasible option. Google seemed like a good place to start. I searched “therapy near me.”

1996 to 2001.

During his tenure as provost, he observed that campus mental health issues were “overwhelming for us and all of our peer universities.” A 2004 investigation by The Crimson had found that almost half of Harvard undergraduates had experienced depression that inhibited their daily function, prompting students to criticize the inadequate supply of mental health resources.

But according to Hyman, beefing up the supply of therapists ran up against a budget constraint — the University could only afford to hire a limited number of mental health professionals without raising the Student Health Fee. Required for all registered students enrolled more than halftime in Massachusetts, the Student Health Fee covers HUHS services — like CAMHS, flu clinics, and alcohol and drug services — in lieu of insurance, says Lewis. It

On top of the hundreds of phone calls to CAMHS Cares and the recorded uptick in student depression and anxiety, Lewis describes “huge turnover” last August as CAMHS therapists left, some moving to private practice. They’re “almost up to full capacity again,” she says, but still down some staff. In March, The Crimson reported that CAMHS employed 36 clinicians, an increase from 32 during the pandemic, but still fewer than in 2018, when it employed 41.

Perhaps raising money specifically for mental health could be an end-around the funding crunch, Hyman suggests. “I think there would be donors. Every family has been touched by this,” he says. And Lewis points out that the CAMHS Cares line is funded entirely by a donation. Much University fundraising takes place behind closed doors, so it’s possible that more donations could continue to improve care. But without a dramatic increase in funding, the existing bottleneck will continue to block

A bunch of ads popped up, followed by Yelp: “The Best 10 Counseling & Mental Health in Cambridge, MA.” I clicked through a few of them. Some were too far away. None were cheap. Mount Auburn Counseling Center, for example, costs between $75 and $175 for a single session. Through ThriveWorks, a site that pairs individuals with local therapists, I found more options, similarly expensive. BetterHelp, a similar site, found the average price range of a therapy session in Cambridge to be $85-$150 and listed “more affordable options” as $60-$90. Many therapists I found online weren’t taking new patients, or weren’t taking them for a while. Some of the cost could be covered by my insurance, but I didn’t know how much, and I couldn’t assume the same would be true for other students. Given that I was intimidated by the insurance process, and I didn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars a semester or travel a good distance to get care, private therapy seemed out of the realm of possibility.

The lack of available private therapists isn’t separate from the

University’s therapist shortage. Hyman points out that even with sufficient University funding, there simply aren’t enough therapists to go around. Nationwide, the pandemic exacerbated a preexisting shortage of mental healthcare providers — as demand for therapy increased, burnout among healthcare providers did, too. Locally, Cambridge Health Alliance, a major healthcare provider serving Cambridge, Somerville, and Boston, lost dozens of therapists and social workers last fall, for example.

“In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the number of therapists outside of the University who are well trained in CBT and who take insurance are very few,” Hyman says, confirming the trouble I had finding a therapist online. Hyman explains that the shortage exists because of poor reimbursement, especially for therapists who take insurance. “People who skillfully do psychotherapy also have to eat and live,” he says.

In some cases, Cambridge residents face even longer wait times than Harvard students. “The thing that makes my heart sink is

when a colleague asks me for a referral for their child, and people say, ‘Oh, yeah, I can see them in six months,’” Hyman says.

And if Harvard hired more local therapists, they would come directly from this alreadylimited pool of local therapists.

“It is zero-sum,” Hyman confirms. “It depletes outside therapists, absolutely.”

He paints an ugly, grim picture, one no amount of funding could solve: There aren’t enough hireable therapists for CAMHS to address all student needs — CAMHS is constrained to function as a shortterm stopgap for people in crisis. For students who would benefit from long-term support but are not in dire need — like Marshall, or like my friend — Harvard would be hiring counselors at the expense of other Cambridge residents. The one-on-one therapy system is neither expandable nor sustainable.

At this point, I felt I’d exhausted on- and off-campus professional counseling. It was time to turn to the alternatives.

In 1971, Margaret McKenna ’70, a recent Harvard grad-

uate and teaching fellow, founded a new therapy organization to address gaps in mental health infrastructure on campus. Called Room 13 after its address in Mather House, McKenna described it as “something in between talking to a friend or roommate and seeing a psychiatrist.”

Half a century later, Room 13 is still in operation, and their flyers, which read “Feeling stressed, lonely, angry, anxious, overwhelmed?” are ubiquitous. Room 13 is now one of five peer therapy groups supervised by CAMHS, which serve as another line of defense for students who struggle to seek professional help.

Other, issue-specific peer therapy organizations have emerged: Contact, which focuses on BGLTQIA+ identities; Eating Concerns Hotline and Outreach, which focuses on eating disorders and body image; Indigo, which focuses on identity and intersectionality; and RESPONSE, which focuses on sexual assault, intimate violence, and relationships. Some of the groups, including Room 13 and ECHO, offer hotlines in addition to their drop-in hours. According to a Contact counselor, all the counselors receive 25-30 hours of training from CAMHS and their organizational directors in the weeks before their first semesters; the training involves a mix of informational content, role playing, and safety requirements.

“I don’t know how many people will call,” McKenna said to The Crimson when Room 13 was first formed. “This place is so lonely and people’s pride is pretty ingrained. But there are people around this university who care, and we’re trying to demonstrate that.”

Room 13 is one of five peer therapy groups supervised by CAMHS, which serve as another line of defense for students who struggle to seek professional help. Photo by Julian J. Giordano.

Peer therapy is accessible, staffed with trained counselors, and freely available. In other words, it seems to offer a solution to many of the issues I found in CAMHS and private therapy, especially for students with less severe but still time-sensitive problems. CAMHS recommends students try peer therapy to get the support they need. I decide to give it a go.

Ibeginwith Room 13. On a Tuesday evening, I approach Thayer, a freshman dormitory, with the feeling that I am casing the premises for a break-in. My ID doesn’t work on the door I try, so I follow a freshman after he swipes in; he eyes me suspiciously.

Once I’m in Thayer’s basement, the room is easy enough to find. A sign encourages me to knock, so I do; I am greeted by two student counselors who gently but efficiently usher me into an adjoining room. It is the beginning of their hours, so I assume I am their first client of the day. Neither counselor asks for my name, and I don’t ask for theirs. No real adult is present, nor any kind of documentation, like a sign-in sheet. The system is clearly designed to ensure privacy and anonymity.

The adjoining room is painted a yellow-beige, dimly-lit, and warm, womblike. We all take off our shoes. Something about the room surprises me. I expected to see my high school guidance counselor’s office: claustrophobic, bowls full of fun-sized candy, walls replete with mindfulness posters. Instead, it’s spacious, and the walls are decorated with minimalist landscape paintings. There’s a bed behind the couch cushions; it’s unclear who sleeps on it. I have a

vision of someone reclining all the way back, to the intonation of So how does that make you feel?

Both counselors sit across from me, cross-legged on two armchairs. They say I can talk about anything, so I let them know it’s my first time here, and while there’s nothing particularly big happening in my life right now, I want to be proactive about my mental health. But midway through a sentence, I start crying.

This is unexpected; I rarely cry. The counselors ask questions to determine what is weighing on me. Out comes a list: I didn’t do so well on a midterm last week, I have to deal with the housing lottery, which relates to a difficult situation with one of my roommates, I am balancing a lot of deadlines, et cetera.

They only ask open-ended questions, the vast majority of which are about how actions or realizations made me feel. We talk a lot about my feelings toward my ex-friend and my obsession with grades. As I talk, I feel calmer, lighter; I stop crying about ten minutes in, but there’s no real way to keep track of time, and I realize I have no idea how the session is supposed to end. One of the counselors leaves. The other counselor continues asking questions, and I continue answering them. She offers neither feedback nor advice — not even anodyne consolation, like “That sounds tough.” Just the questions. At first this is slightly irritating in its one-sidedness. But I soon find the rhythm has a certain appeal: The counselor does not have to share herself, and I do not have to feel like I am talking too long, or taking up too much space. Unlike my friends, she feels no need to offer solutions. The simplicity

gleams: I talk, she listens.

AfterRoom 13, I also try Contact and ECHO. All of the groups follow the same pattern: I walk in, they ask questions, and I answer them. I came to realize that rather than using CBT like many CAMHS therapists, they all employ a nondirective, open-ended form of therapy called Rogerian therapy, in which the patient reaches

insights about their thinking and behavior through answering questions rather than receiving guidance.

Other commonalities I find: All of the groups are somewhat difficult to find, and decorated in a similar way, with landscape minimalism, lamps, and pillows. The vast majority of the counselors I interact with are women. I know

Eating Concerns Hotline and Outreach, or ECHO, is a peer therapy group which focuses on eating disorders and body image. But like all the groups, ECHO seems to be underutilized. Photo by Julian J. Giordano.

many of them to varying degrees. My sessions in peer therapy were mostly positive: I believed that the counselors cared, and were listening — like talking to a friend without the burdens of friendship. Even if it didn’t help me resolve the issues I was dealing with, or understand them better, peer therapy simply felt good to do, a kind of unburdening. Recognizing it might work more for others than it did for me, I

so I have to rely on my own experience: When I visited Room 13, only one other student came in during my hour-long stay; at ECHO and Contact, no other students sought care during my visit. It’s certainly not for a lack of advertising — the groups’ flyers are omnipresent, papering bathroom stalls, bulletin boards, and email lists.

I asked Marshall, a student who sought therapy from CAMHS, why she never tried the peer groups. “It didn’t really seem like an option,” she says. In conversations with friends, many of them — including some who had sought help from CAMHS — had never really considered using the peer groups. They were concerned about compromised anonymity, and uncertain about the rigor of training the groups received. The distrust seemed to reside somewhere in the dissonance between “peer” and “therapy.”

seems that female students are doing a disproportionate share of the emotional labor tied to this kind of work.

It seemed to me that the peer groups were conducting a version of traditional, therapist-patient care, except that the counselors were, of course, not professional therapists. And as much as I enjoyed my experiences with them, I could not bring myself to believe that the counselors could truly help me.

At this point, I had tried CAMHS, private therapy, and peer therapy. I felt that there were gaps in this network of care, and I hoped to find something that captured the peer support aspect of peer therapy, and that feeling of unburdening, without the constraints I had felt with the peer groups.

would (and did) recommend it to a friend.

And yet, what struck me most was its underutilization, even though CAMHS is egregiously oversubscribed, and the therapy groups attend to overlapping issues. Again, numbers aren’t available for this, and many peer counseling groups have a policy against speaking with journalists,

As for me, though I recognized the value of peer therapy, my visits also made me aware of its limitations. Knowing some of my counselors — especially knowing some of them were younger than me — diminished my willingness to be therapized by them: I had unfair reservations about their capacity as therapists because I knew them first as people. And even when I didn’t know the counselors, the dynamic still felt strange; this peer was now someone I could not be friends with, given the patient-therapist relationship that would always precede any friendship. I also didn’t like that all the counselors were women: Although I could not acquire demographic data on the counselors, and may have experienced a biased sample, it

I spoke about this dilemma with Meredith Johns ’23, a friend of mine who sought therapy freshman year, following the death of her brother. She started with CAMHS but eventually moved toward alternative forms of care.

She was in Atlanta over break for her brother’s funeral, and she reached out to CAMHS to make an appointment ahead of coming back to campus. “I thought that was the responsible thing to do,” she recalls.

She tried to book a CAMHS appointment online, but none were available. So she called.

“They said: ‘If there are no appointments, there are no appointments.’ Or something very close to that.” She laughs a little.

“And I said: ‘My brother died a few days ago, and I would really like to talk to someone.’ And they said okay.”

Johns had a few appointments

at CAMHS, but eventually stopped seeing the clinician — “in a pretty non-dramatic way,” she qualifies. Though she says there was nothing wrong with her CAMHS experience, per se, she felt she needed something more specific to dealing with grief.

She started attending “a very woo-woo bereavement group” associated with the Harvard Divinity School. The group met about five times over the semester, in a room at the top of Memorial Church.

Some of her experiences seemed comparable to the peer therapy organizations on campus. “It was very talky,” she says. “Which at the time was good, and is maybe still how I process.”

But unlike peer therapy, the group had an ecumenical bent. For Johns, participating in the group was the start of her broader reorientation towards spiritually oriented care: She started going to Quaker meetings and taking religion classes.

“I got to keep asking why people suffer, while I was suffering the most I’ve ever suffered, in a way that I had trouble connecting with people about.” She pauses. “Yeah, therapy just didn’t do it.”

Given Johns’s emphasis on religious and spiritual spaces, I decide to seek out counsel from a religious leader in a religious space, although I am not religious myself. On a Thursday afternoon between biology class and lunch, I go to confession at St. Paul’s Parish, the Catholic church in Harvard Square, and I speak to a priest, both about how I am doing and about how his work could be a form of mental health care.

He affirms the value of therapy, but he makes clear that he sees his work as distinct. “Therapy is

about body-mind integration,” he says. “I also touch on the spirit.”

His words echo Johns’s comments — this idea of a third dimension of selfhood that therapy can’t quite reach.

We shift to discussing my current quandaries, and I tell him about my difficult roommate situation. His counsel: “Sometimes what grates on other people is our defects. We must strive to eliminate our imperfections.”

This surprises me. So far, no one I received care from has told me to change anything about myself or given me clear, firm advice. Unlike the unflinching positivity of friends and the nondirective questioning of the peer groups, he was willing to suggest that I had problems — something that seems essential to making progress.

But in the confession box, we were still conforming to a particular model of mental health care: isolated, one-on-one, caregiver and care receiver. And for the plurality of students who don’t identify as Catholic (myself included), or even as religious, this form of care is limited in its helpfulness; the priest couched much of his advice in Catholic doctrine.

I get the sense that it’s not simply the religious aspect of Johns’s bereavement group that mattered to her — it’s the community attached to it, the feeling of embeddedness and mutual care.

“I actually think one of the main things I got out of that space was affirmation or validation from peers, and especially slightly older peers, that I was doing vaguely the right things about mental health and grief,” Johns says.

So what would such a

community look like if it were secular?

Every week, a group of six to eight students gathers around a table, with no one sitting at the head, to talk about their mental health. This is Harvard Undergraduate Group Peer Therapy, a newly-founded student organization. Each session, they start by filling out the GAD-7 (General Anxiety Disorder-7) and PHQ-9 (Patient Health Questionnaire-9), forms that measure anxiety and depression respectively, and they map their fluctuations throughout the semester. The atmosphere is quiet, relaxed. But over the course of the 75-minute session, as they discuss both their relationships and one of four topics — role transitions, interpersonal disputes, grief and loss, and isolation — they become more animated. When HUGPT first convened, at the beginning of fall semester, many of its members were relative strangers. Now, they discuss their weeks with intimacy and vulnerability.

Unlike the other peer therapy organizations, HUGPT works at the level of a group, with no counselor-patient central dynamic. HUGPT uses Interpersonal Psychotherapy, rather than Rogerian therapy or CBT. According to their website, IPT is based on two ideas: that mental health is largely determined by people’s relationships, and that relationship health is primarily driven by the communication of needs and emotions. “Nobody communicates their emotions perfectly,” the website reads, “but the hope of IPT-G is that by talking about our relationships with a group of peers, each person can contribute their own wisdom

as well as learn from the wisdom of their fellows.”

In other words, HUGPT somewhat resembles the group Johns joined in that it is centered around interpersonal relationships, though with a secular communal dimension, rather than a religious one.

I did not attend the group out of respect for the privacy of its members. But I spoke with one of its founders, Suhaas M. Bhat ’23’24, who has long dreamt of what he terms a peer group “therapeutic church” — something that would reside at the intersection of peer therapy, community support, and spirituality.

“In high school, I was a sad boy,” he says, laughing, before delving into his early struggles with depression and anxiety and

his experiences with CBT. This oscillation between humor and gravitas characterizes the rest of the conversation.

During his first semester of college, Bhat had recently gotten out of his first relationship, and was tasked with making new friends and figuring out what he wanted his college experience to look like. “Saying goodbye to a version of myself took place over that semester,” he says. “I drowned myself in work.”

As a member of Harvard’s chapter of Effective Altruism, a movement and philosophy aimed at improving the world, Bhat learned about StrongMinds, an organization in Uganda that provides peer-facilitated psychotherapy to women.

StrongMinds has treated 140,000

women for depression, with low relapse rates and a cost of only about $50 per woman for the entire course of treatment.

Inspired by this model, Bhat and his fellow EA member Eric H. Li ’23-24 envisioned a scalable, accessible peer group therapy program for Harvard students.

After meeting with CAMHS and receiving six months of training from the Interpersonal Psychotherapy Institute, Bhat and Li launched HUGPT in the fall of 2021.

Bhat and Li see their group as a less intimidating alternative to professional therapy. As their pubbing email reads: “Formal therapy can feel daunting but imagine a clinically-validated therapy (no cost or insurance required) where you talk through what’s on your mind with people who understand. HUGPT is a safe space where students support each other in building healthy and fulfilling relationships that can meaningfully reduce depression and anxiety.”

Peer group therapy has the potential to address the supplyside issues Hyman raised, by broadening the care suppliers beyond licensed therapists and enabling the proliferation of training. “There are a lot of people who want to provide care for each other. You don’t have to be a special person to do that,” Bhat says. “Few people don’t want to take care of each other.” Rather than position some peers as counselors and some as patients, everyone in the group cares for and is cared for by one another.

Bhat synthesizes the more spiritual aspects of care Johns discussed with a secular idea of community. Early in our conversation, I confide in him

Some students find consolation in religious spaces, like Harvard’s Memorial Church, a non-denominational Christian church in Harvard Yard. Photo by Joey Huang.

Suhaas M. Bhat ’23-24 is one of the co-founders of Harvard Undergraduate Group Peer Therapy, a new organization that uses Interpersonal Psychotherapy techniques. Photo courtesy of Suhaas Bhat.

my growing skepticism towards therapy. “Therapy is not the endall, be-all. Therapy is our cultural substitute for religion,” he argues. “Group therapy is useful because it facilitates a sense of community and support.”

Ultimately, Bhat envisions peer therapy as part of a broader move toward “proactive therapeutic care instead of reactive care,” he says. “Currently the way we do care is that we wait for something really bad, then we get you a therapist … Check-ups instead of surgeries makes things easier.”

His ideal: Upon admission to Harvard, every student would receive an intake, an initial assessment to determine if they need care. If they need more intensive treatment, they can get it. If they want to join a peer group, there’s a pipeline for that, too. But in general, proactivity is institutionalized, so students no longer feel that the onus is on them to secure care.

Bhat hopes to expand HUGPT on campus and spark similar movements at peer institutions. But it’s worth noting that his group, like the other peer therapy organizations, has struggled to recruit and retain students. “The hardest thing was and continues to be getting high volumes,” he says. “Because there’s something scary about going to a group of people and baring your soul.”

Bhat’s expansive communal model of mental healthcare, one based in endogenous rather than exogenous care, resonates with me. Beyond peer therapy, I wonder what other forms of community support exist on campus, and how they could be expanded.

Ninety-eight percent of undergraduates live in the upperclassmen houses. Bhat calls the house system “the true social organizer of Harvard.” And when I applied to Harvard, the houses were a big draw.

I’ll be honest, though: In my time here, I’ve never seen the houses as a center of my social or emotional life. Aside from eating, sleeping, and working, I’ve spent very little time in my house; I’ve barely interacted with my tutors or house committee.

But much of the scaffolding for communal care already exists in the upperclassmen house system: Resident tutors and house deans are on call to help students, and the wellness tutors program, which began in 2004, has since expanded to offer care for mental health issues and more. The Cabot House website’s Wellness page defines wellness as having many components, including stress, anxiety, depression, sleep deprivation, and religion and faith; the wellness tutors serve as “point people for any concerns, questions or requests you might have to help you live a better, fuller, and more balanced life.”

In mid April, after struggling through nights of insomnia, my roommate Vicki Xu ’23-’24, a Crimson Magazine writer, called the HUHS hotline and was eventually connected to a resident tutor in Currier House. He talked to her for about half an hour. An hour later, she was able to go to sleep.

After a few days, the resident tutor followed up over email, offering to talk about sleeping and rest tips. Xu’s house dean also reached out.

Xu was surprised that her house had become the nexus of mental health care she received.

“I honestly didn’t think of it as a possibility,” she says. “It just didn’t cross my mind.” But as a Peer Advising Fellow for freshmen herself, she’s familiar with some of the protocol for this in freshman dorms and entryways, she says.

This gap in support between freshman year and upperclassmen housing extends beyond her experience. According to the 2020 Mental Health Task Force report, students saw the freshman year system of advisors, proctors, and PAFs as a “major strength” but felt that “this system of support largely disappears once they move into the Houses.” The report also notes that houses differed in the range and quality of support offered, and that tutors and proctors are “unclear or facing changing expectations about their role in recognizing and responding to serious mental health issues among their students.”

A stronger, clearer role for the houses in mental health care could be part of a proactive effort to take some of the burden off of professional therapy. “CAMHS used to say there’s no problem too small. But with overwhelming need, there has to be more support prior to seeking professional help,” Lewis says.

In the meantime, Xu has been attending the Currier House wellness study breaks, which involve making tea and doing guided meditations. “I do think it is important that when something like this happens, the tutors and deans check in on you,” she says.

Each upperclassman house — like Currier, pictured here — has a network of support, from resident deans to wellness tutors. Photo by Anne Foley.

In taking my inventory of available mental healthcare for students, I tried to evaluate each component’s strengths and limitations, in an effort to imagine how, together, they might form an effective mosaic of care. Still, I found the overall network insufficient — for people with severe mental health issues, there’s a shortage of therapists, and for people with less pressing concerns, there were still too many ways to fall through the cracks. Even I had trouble as I poured more time into these efforts than most students have to spare.

Taboo around discussing mental health persists, as illustrated by my conversation with my friend, as well as my difficulty finding people to speak about their mental health on the record. But in the interviews I did get to conduct, mental health care was spoken about candidly as a responsible and reasonable treatment to seek, something that could be discussed with friends.

To me this suggests that we’ve progressed through some destigmatization, such that we feel more comfortable encouraging people to get therapy. The tricky part is balancing that de-stigmatization with the understanding that therapy is not a panacea, and it’s far from an unlimited resource. Calls for CAMHS to simply bulk up are misguided: Even with added funding, CAMHS can never expand to the extent that every student could have immediate access to a licensed clinician — and along the way, such an expansion would take therapists from the surrounding community, away from people who are no less

deserving of therapy than Harvard students.

And while students demand more CAMHS therapists, the peer groups remain underused, which I see as evidence that valorizing therapy has cost us our faith in our peers’ ability to care for us. I count myself guilty in this; although I found my time at peer therapy cathartic, at no point did I completely overcome my skepticism about its efficacy.

To be clear: Some people need and benefit from therapy done by a professionally trained, licensed clinician. I do not mean to diminish the value of therapy, especially for people with severe mental illness for whom it can be life-saving. And I want to reiterate the limitations of my own experience, as someone who stands to benefit less from care.

But there seems to be a belief that no matter what your problem is, some form of professional therapy will work for you. And that is not the case: Many of the people I spoke with found that therapy wasn’t compatible with their needs. So “you should try CAMHS” simply does not cut it.

In sum: While therapy can be crucial for some, increased, professional one-on-one therapy is not — and cannot be — the answer to all of our mental health woes. Instead, there needs to be a more radical reimagining of mental health care that includes therapy but extends beyond it, one that centers community and relationships and builds on existing campus infrastructure — a more tightly woven safety net that catches people before they need professional help. Maybe that looks like an expanded version of

Bhat’s peer group, or a bolstered house-life-centered system. But it could also be something unexpected and different.

As for me, I’ve been taking an ornithology class this semester, which has required me to go birdwatching many weekend mornings with classmates. I also spent spring break with these classmates on a class trip to a few wildlife refuges on the gulf coast of Texas. We’ve seen a lot of birds. Mostly we’ve seen one another: We’ve slept inches apart, eaten meals together, huddled in early morning when it was cool and shared water when it was hot. We’ve talked about friendships, relationships, anxiety, and God. They, more than anyone, have helped me come to terms with the end of a friendship. In many ways, it’s been a lot like Bhat’s peer group: a set of relative strangers recurrently convening in an insulated space, supporting each other mentally and emotionally.

My birds class has offered the aspects of care I’ve come to see as crucial: It’s built into life in an integrated academic-social way; it’s mutually supportive, sustained, and permeated by a greater, even ineffable, sense of belonging.

I don’t give this as an example of a replacement for professional therapy, or something that would work for everyone. But for me, it’s consoling to feel that beyond the bounds of close friendships, and outside of the therapist’s office, there exists the possibility of a more universal care.

where the learning never stops

where the learning never stops

When the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement prepared to put on a production of “The Tempest” at the Cambridge Public Library Auditorium, Helen E. Bakeman, a student at the institute, was unsatisfied with the minimal roles for women in the play. She wanted to audition for a riotous character — someone novel and thrilling. So she tried out for the role of Caliban, the villainous son of a witch.

“I thought ‘No, I want to play a teenage monster boy,’” she says, adding, “And where else are a bunch of 70-year-olds going to be able to get parts and play as teenage boys? Nowhere else.” During the audition, she mimicked Caliban by jumping and running around onstage. Ultimately, she says, “I made a total fool of myself and got the part.”

Reflecting on her theatrical endeavor, Bakeman remarks, “Caliban is rough and gruff. He gets drunk in the play. He recites poetry. He’s brazen…It was the

At the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement, retired professionals seek to broaden their minds through a classic liberal arts education model. Photo by Truong L. Nguyen.

kya I. brooks

last Shakespeare play I think I will do, and it was the most fun I’ve had in years.”

Bakeman began taking courses after she retired from a varied professional life in project management as well as social science research and consulting. A self-proclaimed workaholic, she didn’t want to marinate in her sudden free time without a sense of purpose. She saw retirement as a time for rejuvenation, not stagnation, and eagerly immersed herself in the intensive and exploratory learning model of HILR.

The student body at the HILR is composed of retired professionals like Bakeman seeking to broaden their minds together through a classic liberal arts education model. The 550 students lead and attend the more than 120 peer-led courses and enrichment activities that the program offers.

Linda S. Sultan, for instance, rediscovered the joys of reading literary classics through the HILR. She shocked a young family member when she told them she had read all seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s novel “In Search of Lost Time,” infamous for its length of 4,215 pages.

While Sultan studied literature, Bakeman dived into a course on the Civil Rights movement, then waded into more personal territory by taking courses on immigration. “My parents were Holocaust refugees, so I grew up thinking about immigration, and so I’ve remained interested in it,” she says. In one class, students chose an immigrant group to research and present to their peers. This final project later inspired her to read and research autobiographies written by former African American slaves.

As another intellectual challenge, Bakeman is currently taking a course on Jacob Lawrence, a Black artist who painted “The Migration Series,” which portrays the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South to the North. Art history is a realm largely unfamiliar to her, and she wants to learn to appreciate art on a deeper level. “I go to a museum and I know what I like, but that’s very different than really standing in front of a painting and saying ‘Okay, what am I seeing? What’s it telling me?’” she says, adding, “I think when I go to museums, I’ll do it differently now.”

In many ways, the HILR is an exemplary model of the traditional liberal education that values the virtue of learning for personal fulfillment and growth, rather than for professional development. There are no exams or essays. The HILR encourages students to teach classes of their own. Students refer to these classes as study groups, and everyone contributes to discussion. According to Bakeman, her peers “aren’t afraid in a class to say ‘I don’t think I understood this part in the reading. Could we talk about it a little bit, or could someone explain it to me?’”

David F. Bliss, another student, enjoys the community aspect of HILR’s teaching method. “We don’t distinguish between those who are the teachers and those who are the learners. We’re all learners in a sense,” he says. After a career as a scientist with a Ph.D in material science and engineering, the HILR gave Bliss a chance to shift subject matter and study social science.

“This is a part of my learning experience that I wasn’t really engaged in in my working life,

so this gave me the opportunity to indulge in the world culture, the canon of literature that is out there that I had not been able to read or didn’t have time to read when I was working, so it’s really been a wonderful, broadening experience,” Bliss says.

Bliss had the chance to lead a course on evolution, blending the sciences and humanities by focusing on how the theory affected both American writers and scientists. He also co-taught a course on Leonardo da Vinci — while his co-teacher, who was an artist, discussed the aesthetics of the paintings, Bliss analyzed the science and engineering aspects of da Vinci’s notebooks.

Bakeman, too, was inspired to spearhead her own course. She taught a class on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, an industrial disaster in New York City that claimed 146 lives, most of them female workers. After first hearing about the catastrophe, Bakeman says she went down a research rabbit hole, looking into the historical forces at the time of the tragedy, including the women’s movement, labor movement, industrialization, and immigration. Bakeman wanted to lead this course “as a way to pull together all these strands of American history,” she says.

Sultan is always impressed by her classmates’ enthusiasm and preparedness. Ten minutes before each class begins, she says everyone has already arrived, ready to discuss. “It’s much better than undergrad. I think partly because we have the time to do it, but, you know, it’s so much more interesting at this stage in life because we’ve traveled more,” she says. “We’ve lived longer.”

The patron saint of the harvard crimson

Former Harvard Crimson President Fabian Fall, Class of 1910, was racing through life. At just 15, he was accepted into both Oxford and Harvard. He entered and graduated from Oxford in two and half years, making him the youngest graduate from the program in over two decades. In 1906, he began studying at Harvard and finished his degree requirements in a year. He became an editor at The Crimson as a sophomore, then Managing Editor as a junior, the same year he started studying at the Law School. He was elected President in the spring of 1909.

That summer, Fall joined a military exercise known as the Red and Blue War of 1909, meant to test

soldiers through a simulation of wartime conditions. On August 17, Fall sent an urgent message to his cousin to come to the South Armory in Boston. Moments later, he killed himself. He was a teen prodigy. He had everything going for him. What happened? ***

While there’s no definitive explanation for Fall’s death, his own ambition almost surely played a role. A New York Times article published the day after attributes his suicide to “overstudy.” His obituary in The Crimson attributes it to the effects of “undue exertion and exposure to the sun” in training camp on a mind and body “already overtaxed with the year’s work.”

Meimei Xu

Fabian Fall, a former Crimson President who died by suicide in 1909, is memorialized in the Crimson’s Sanctum. Photo by Julian J. Giordano

Today, Fall’s bronze bust overlooks the Sanctum, the large, wood-paneled room on the second floor of The Crimson. It’s the only such figure in the room. The plaque underneath makes no mention of the fact that he took his own life. Each time I see it, I can’t help but wonder why we choose to memorialize him and him alone. What, exactly, are we placing on a pedestal?

I only learned about Fall’s story two years after joining The Crimson, when I happened to Google the name on the little plaque. But the more I learned, the more I saw some part of him in myself, as I attempt to find my place at this paper over a century later.

On nights that I have Crimson duties, I enter the newsroom after 8:00 p.m., chattering and laughing with my fellow writers as we sit down to edit our pieces. The air is lively, the banter is flowing, and people leave one by one with a finished story.

Then, 11:30 p.m. hits. The last writers shuffle out, unless there’s a piece that takes long into the night to edit — which happens at least once or twice a week. If I’m scheduled to flow articles into the daily print layout, I’ll see the newsroom gradually turn silent. The proof readers have their heads buried in articles. If it’s a good day, the laughter will continue into the night. If not, someone halfheartedly tries to play music, but after two Phoebe Bridgers songs, it dies. We keep working in silence until we close out at 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 a.m.

In a typical week, I have hours of interviews and meetings, comp seminars to plan and teach, other people’s pieces to edit, and my own articles that require hours of

sourcing, planning, and writing and sometimes days of editing. I’m replying to emails in class, if not skipping lectures altogether, just to get whatever sleep I can.

Earlier this semester, the news broke that nearly 40 faculty signed a letter questioning Harvard’s investigation into professor John L. Comaroff’s alleged sexual harassment and misconduct. At the time, I was writing a 2,000word story on dining labor shortages and had several other papers due for my classes. Even with two Crimson co-writers to help, I was unable to sustain the pace — the only sleep I got was by accident.

I didn’t know who to turn to. My editors sat me down and offered their help, but I knew I couldn’t take it. If I felt this way, they were surely dealing with worse. If I stayed up late, I knew they were staying up later. Everyone wants to be there for each other, but none of us truly can be.

In the middle of one of the worst nights of my life, I talked to a friend in my dark, lamp-lit dorm. I didn’t know if it was ever going to get better, I told him. I had already set my heart on this career, and I couldn’t see a way out. I had to be incredible, or I would be nothing at all.

He turned his face away from mine. He didn’t want to see this happen, he said. He just wanted to see me happy. He asked me how he could help. I told him there was simply no way he could.

In the year and a half we had known each other, it was the first time I saw him cry.

***

Most — if not all — of this stress is self-inflicted.

I don’t like admitting it, but I know why I and so many others

do this.

The Crimson’s masthead is a pipeline for major news outlets and magazines. Its highly secretive, exhausting, and erratic selection process for leadership roles — the Turkey Shoot — has loomed over my head for three consecutive semesters, even though it only lasts one month each fall. It involves two rounds of interviews with members of the outgoing masthead, deliberators who were friends and confidants just days before. What happens during the final interview is confidential, but victors and losers alike have told me they emerged disillusioned with the institution to which they’ve dedicated their entire college careers.

I hesitate to even write this piece. In that final room, I don’t want to be known as the one who complained. I don’t want to be the troublemaker. I don’t want to be yet another burden.

For better or for worse, I can’t imagine myself doing anything else — learning from different perspectives, uncovering the hidden story, and, hopefully, instilling in others the passion for this work. I love writing, and I love editing, and I love teaching, and I love journalism.

So tell me, what kind of love pushes me to sign up for that extra article when my eyes are already burning while writing this one? What kind of love convinces me to take on another leadership role, knowing it will subtract ten more hours each week from my overdrawn schedule? What is it that I love, when I’ve seen what this place has done — to Fabian Fall, to my editors, to my friends — and still return to it, night after night?

Shabbat and the Sake of the Week

M. F. Wilson

In the beginning, the story goes, God made the heavens and the earth. God made day and night, put stars in the sky and plants in the dirt. And on the seventh day, God was tired. So God rested.

“God rests. What does that mean?” asks Jaime G. Drucker, who works as the Student Activities Director and Reform Community Advisor at Harvard Hillel. I asked Jaime to talk to me about Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest that occurs every week, from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Observing Shabbat is the fourth of the Ten Commandments.

I met her a few weeks ago during a lunch at Rabbi Dani’s house. The Rabbi said something interesting, and I wanted to write it down. “Does anyone have a pen?” I asked loudly, probably a little obnoxiously. Jaime leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Just so you know, some people here don’t write on Shabbat.”

The specificity of these rules has been lost to me over the years post-graduating Jewish preschool. Jaime reminds me: No phone, no laptop. No writing, no electricity. According to the Torah, these activities do not qualify as rest. “You can’t find me. I don’t have to answer any of my emails. I’m free not only of the task, but of the burden of the task. It’s just gone,” she says. Wow, I think. That sounds really nice, actually.

Jaime grew up in Florida in a relatively unobservant Jewish family. “My sister calls us ‘bagel and lox Jews,’” she says. In college at the University of Florida, she studied religion with a focus on Islam. “I was doing all this research and asking these people about themselves and their relationship with their

religion, and someone just very kindly asked me, ‘What about you?’”

“It just felt like: Whoosh. There is something dishonest about that, to not have asked myself the same things I’m asking other people,” Jaime says. That realization began her journey of religious inheritance. “Maybe I do want to live by these things,” she remembers thinking. “What’s my next opportunity to live by this?

After graduating college, Jaime came to the Divinity School to continue her religious education, where, in a class with Jon Levenson, she was “rocked by commandedness.”

“They say when the Torah was revealed it said: ‘we will do and we will understand.’ The way we talk about the Torah is, you have a certain kind of trust that you will just do the thing, and in doing it, you live your way into understanding why.”

So Jaime started doing exactly that. During the beginning of the pandemic, she began the weekly practice of observing Shabbat. She cherished Shabbat meals with her pandemic pod. “Especially with Zoom and Covid, it made that day feel meaningful when the rest of the week felt weird,” she says.

So does it work? After Shabbat, does she feel rested? Turns out it’s a little more complicated than that. “I don’t know if I feel rested,” she begins. “It’s just a reminder that I am a person apart from the things that I do, and that’s a big part of Shabbat too. You’re not allowed to create or destroy… You just marvel at the world as it is, and maybe lament that the world is

Maya

not as it could be. So that is a great reset. But we live in the world. We live in the world as much as we live in Shabbat.”

Oftentimes, in the wake of the sabbath, Jaime feels heartbroken. “People talk about the Sunday scaries or whatever?” she says with a laugh. “I get so sad every week.”

Jaime jogged another distant Hebrew school memory about the closing ceremony of Shabbat on Saturday evening, called Havdalah. Havdalah literally means separation, and she

The way I’m following it thus far, part of religious connection comes from doing with the trust that in that doing, there will come an understanding of why. But isn’t that paradoxical: we’re being commanded to rest, and in following that commandment, we are doing, which is, in fact, the opposite of rest?

Jaime acknowledges this dissonance: “Maybe it’s hard, but I think rabbis [and] God, they’re smart. They get that it’s hard to be a person. It’s hard to rest. So we’re

explains that it’s intended to honor the division between the week and the sabbath. “Every day is not supposed to be Shabbat. Some people say you bring little pieces of Shabbat into your week, that’s fine. There is a sacredness in separation, though,” she says.

I appreciate the tangible boundary Havdalah provides when considering the everyday and the holy, work and rest. And I appreciate that the ritual of Shabbat punctuates the rhythm of the week with some stillness.

going to command you to rest, because it’s in the fabric of the universe, as the creation story tells us. And because otherwise we won’t.”

Sitting across from my friend Jeremy O.S. Orenstein ’24 in the dining hall, we’re talking about Judaism and how awesome rest is. He says, “Let’s do it this weekend! Come on! Let’s celebrate Shabbat!” He really said this. I check my calendar: I can’t this weekend. I’m taking some kids on a field trip to the aquarium and I definitely need my phone for that.

Harvard Hillel. Photo by Joey Huang

kizzy kee has high hopes

The earthy scent of weed fills the air as I ascend to a second-story walk-up in Mattapan, Mass., where about a dozen people have gathered for Gallery 205’s Saturday night “Toke N Paint.” Every week, between 6 and 10 p.m., participants can get high and paint — for a sum of $50 dollars per ticket. Kizzy Kee, a cannabis entrepreneur who organizes the event, leads me up the stairs and introduces me to her co-founder, the “Candy Man,” who provides event-goers with a small baggie of graham cracker edibles and offers me a cup of (non-edible) popcorn.

Rap and R&B blares over the speakers; at some point, there is a noticeable playlist change from old school hip hop to TikTok hits. Meanwhile, faded participants fill in a series of outlined sketches stacked next to brushes, paint, and easels on a back table. I choose a design, illustrated by the Candy Man’s sister, that depicts a three-fingered alien hugging someone’s — or something’s — Kardashian-esque rump. The Candy Man tells me — twice — that this is by far his favorite design.

Between my interviews with Kee and the Candy

josie F. abugov

Graphic by Sophia Salamanca ’25.

this final addition: the blue butt looms large against the night sky.

My efforts at interviewing the fellow Toke N Paint participants are futile: the two other people at my table are immersed in the joys of high painting, and it feels rude to interrupt their mellow daze; a pair at the back of the room, whom I guess to be a motherdaughter duo, speak quietly to each other while sharing a joint.

Later, I talk to Kee in a side room at the venue. She’s proud of Toke N Paint’s success, and describes the joys that have come from it. For Kee, one of the most rewarding aspects of this project has been seeing guests’ surprising creativity in such a low-stakes environment. “We have this one picture that I love,” says Kee about one of the prepared outlines that guests can paint. “It’s been done about seven, eight times, but you would never know it’s that same picture. So many people can see so many different things in that one picture,” she says.

Kee has high hopes for the venture — she considers it a kind

podcasts alongside the Candy Man: one on “weed politics,” a morning show that sits at the intersection of cannabis industry news and larger headlines, and another called “Bars and Blunts,” that seeks to highlight local musicians invested in the cannabis industry.

This wasn’t always Kee’s plan. She says that she was selling weed on the black market until Boston attorney and activist Shanel Lindsay, who serves on the Massachusetts Cannabis Advisory Board, approached her and encouraged her to go legal. Eventually, she enrolled in the Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission’s Social Equity Program, where she attended workshops, classes, and trainings on cannabis entrepreneurship in Massachusetts.

The program shifted Kee’s perspective in a number of ways: she became knowledgeable on the difficulties of cannabis cultivation and learned the upsides of relying on automation instead of additional employees. “I did

of cannabis entrepreneurs are Black — and her hopes of seeing that number expand into double digits.

“They’re going through the same thing, so they understand most likely where you’re coming from,” Kee says of her fellow entrepreneurs from the Social Equity Program. Being around them helps her stay motivated; when she’s having trouble, “they’ll be like, ‘Oh, no no no, I got this for you. Don’t worry about it.’”

The camaraderie among these entrepreneurs serves as a kind of buffer — a buffer people of color shouldn’t have to create, Kee points out — against the atmosphere of an industry that has historically marginalized Black people and the ongoing effects of the War on Drugs’ criminalization of Black cannabis users.

For Kee, this is just the beginning. “I probably quit cannabis, I want to tell you, probably maybe 99 times,” Kee says. But the support of her fellow Social Equity Participants kept her going. “We made a pact that we

Harvard Yard Harvard Yard

Above: Along the Charles River, one of the first daffodils of the season turns its head to the sun.

Below: Students celebrate a return to non-frigid temperatures with a game of spikeball.

Below: Seen from the sky, the Yard’s thoroughfares form striking geometric patterns.

Above: A European starling, a blackbird native to Massachusetts, stands alert in the grass.

Springs to Life Springs to Life

Below: Undergraduates chat and flip burgers at an outdoor cookout by Weld.

Above: Barren branches yield to fragrant, white flowers on a tree near the Science Center.

Below: Pastel-colored lawn chairs dot the Yard, inviting students to sit and relax.

Above: Members of the crew team row down the Charles, leaving ripples in their wake.

ADVICE FOR JOSH: in a rut?

With classes over, finals in full swing, and summer just beyond the horizon, it’s easy to feel a little downtrodden or uninspired — stuck

fm executives

tracks that will lead you where you’re meant to go. Tough love has its place, but so does self-love — not the kind that would have you buying face masks and overpriced lotion, but the kind that encourages rest and self-reflection. I’m just saying, don’t be so hard on yourself, Josh.

— Maliya V. Ellis ***

Do something kind for someone else! It’s the best way to broaden your perspective on the world, and you’ll feel better after getting out of your own head for a bit. Offer to teach your roommate how to unload the dishwasher. Volunteer your extensive knowledge of 20th-century French literature to your classmates in section. Inform the girl standing next to you in the Tatte line that it’s pronounced es-press-oh, no “x.” Convince your best friend to break up with her goodfor-nothing boyfriend. Don’t worry if your own life is out of whack — this is the perfect opportunity to get someone else’s in order.

— Sophia S. Liang ***

in a rut, one might say. At least, that’s the case for Josh, FM’s favorite anonymous forever freshman always in need of advice. We asked our editors for their best tips on how to emerge from a late-spring trough into a glistening summer. Here is what (a few of them) had to say. The rest, presumably deep in a rut of their own, had nothing salient to share. ***

Have you ever heard of stochastic gradient descent? No? Well, it’s an algorithm for finding a “global optimum” while avoiding ruts. The details aren’t important, but I will give you the big idea: to get out of a rut, there are two things you need: momentum and randomness.

Sometimes you just need to pick a direction — any direction — and start moving as fast as you can. The math says it doesn’t really matter which way you go as long as you move fast enough. Basically, don’t get so caught up in making the right move that you forget to move at all.

— Harrison R. T. Ward ***

So, you’re in a rut. Or are you? I don’t mean to sound facetious — feeling like you’re in a rut usually comes with a sense of shame, and I think it’s worth trying to articulate where that shame is coming from. “Rut” implies you should be doing something else — but where are those expectations coming from, and do they reflect what you actually want?

What you think is a rut could just be growing pains, or perhaps an entry point into a new set of

Stop fighting the rut, and feel bad about yourself instead. Watch Bojack Horseman and eat Goldfish in bed. Request extensions on your paper twenty minutes before it’s due. Here’s a suggested eating schedule: 4 p.m. breakfast, 10 p.m. lunch, 4 a.m dinner. Become nocturnal. When you’re sufficiently disgusted with yourself, and you decide to start doing the bare minimum again, simply seeing the light of day will feel opulent!

— Josie F. Abugov ***

Read a Joan Didion essay and rip a bong.

—Sarah W. Faber ***

“He should go to Berryline.”

— Maya M. F. Wilson ***

Getting out of a rut is simple. If you’re in a rut, find a ladder. Climb the rungs of said ladder. Oh no, you got to the top of the ladder and there are no more rungs but a lot more rut? Okay. Grab a second ladder, and place it on top of your first ladder. Now, climb the rungs of the second ladder. Why didn’t you tape the two ladders together? Now you’ve fallen backwards back into the rut because the second ladder wasn’t secured? C’mon, this really isn’t rocket science. Why didn’t I tell you to tape the second ladder to the first?

First of all, watch your tone, I’m trying to help you. Second of all, I felt like the secure the ladder part was kinda obvious, man. Like if I didn’t tell you to use the rungs of the ladder, then would you have just stared at the ladder blankly like there’s—. Hey, I’m talki—. Stop interrupti—! You know what? Ask someone else for help, rut-man.

— Kevin Lin

Graphic by Julia Freitag.

keep it moving

by soleil C. saint-cyr

Keep It Moving Soleil Saint-Cyr ACROSS

1. Sorta

5. Lions' hair

10. Carve

14. Discontinued iPod

15. Dramatic film effect

16. Biblical prnoun

17. Kiddo

18. Run or lift, say

20. Fake

22. Quantity with both speed and direction

23. "thank u next" singer, to fans

24. "That's super meta, dude"

26. Ornamental art style

28. Extends, as a book from a library

30. At the drop of __

32. "I'll pass"

33. With 43-Across, components of a vector quantity, like 57-Across

35. Puts money on it

36. __ instant

37. "Omg!"

40. Like Topaz

43. See 33-Across

48. @college email ending

49. Classic 1982 sci-fi film set in a mainframe

51. From what place

52. Steinway and Kawasaki competitor

54. Have a nice meal

56. Dunster and DeWolfe, in Cambridge, MA

57. It keeps you going?

59. Southie parade honoree

61. Like the Harvard Crimson

63. Model Hadid

64. It's not odd

65. ___ -3 Fatty Acids

66. Fe

67. Hit Crtl-Shift-Z

68. Iranians of old 69. ___ shui

DOWN

1. Disney Channel show starring China Anne McClain

2. Many techies' home

3. Faintest idea

4. "Little piggies"

5. Knicks' home (Abbr.)

6. Motrin alternative

7. They're yellow-lined, for lawyers

8. Jannings who won the first Best Actor Oscar

9. North-western Mexican state

10. Set of values

11. [Points]

12. "dont smile at me" opening track(2017)

13. Phillips smart lighting

19. Mary was one (and the Queen of them!)

21. Astronomer Hubble

25. This: Sp.

27. "I get it!" sounds

29. Lady of Camelot

31. Charles, WIlliam, or George, in England

34. Hit Crtl-Z

35. The B in MB

38. Embroidered, e.g.

39. Post-marathon woes

40. "Yo!"

41. Biblical first people, with “and”

42. Said-to-be

44. Bring about

45. Give a pep-talk to, say

46. Stop sign shape

47. Russian doll

49. "Divergent" actor James

50. Haphazard

53. ___ acid

55. Pic or flic

58. Denominator in units of 22-Across

60. End-of-week exclamation

61. A pop

62. Vegas opener?

SOLUTIONS: