Beyond the Limits of Self-Image
February 13, 2020

     Harvard was also a surprise.  I didn't see that one coming either.  And this fact constantly reminds me to treat my preconceived ideas – particularly about myself – with a healthy dose of skepticism.

 * * * 

     Right up until I received my acceptance letter in the mail – they actually came on physical, paper letters back in those days, by snail mail – I was telling people it wasn't going to happen.  Everybody just needed to chill out.  On one level, it was a desperate attempt at expectations management on my part.  But even long before I felt the need to tamp down expectations about Harvard specifically (mine and everyone else's), I had "decided" – and announced – that I had no need and no intention of going to college anywhere west of the Rockies or east of the Mississippi.  I liked it fine right here in the middle of the country, thank you very much.  The middle of the country fit the self-image I had come by honestly, though not easily: simple, poetry-slinging, horse-and-Jesus-loving girl, a little heavy in the gray matter.  More Willa Cather than J.D. Salinger, in any case.  I had, in fact, only applied to one other college: a very small, private liberal arts college in a suburb north of Kansas City, with historical ties to the Southern Baptist Convention.  At William Jewell, I thought, I could continue my riding lessons and maybe even work at a horse barn, since one of my riding instructors owned a large barn and arena in another Kansas City suburb.

   But then that crazy acceptance letter from Harvard arrived on April 4, 1997, and I had to re-evaluate my self-image – or at least the limitations that I thought my self-image imposed.  I had to start thinking about how that self-image of mine might fare at a place like Harvard.

     I had never been to Harvard.  Hell, I had only been east of the Mississippi once, and that was on a trip to Washington D.C. with my parents when I was five.  A college visit – let alone the college tours that some families take their kids on, visiting half a dozen campuses or more before application season gets into full swing – was simply beyond my family's financial means.  So I had almost no idea of what to expect about Harvard.  I knew the name, the reputation, the general location, the pictures from the glossy promotional materials.  I also knew that only one other person from my high school had ever gone to Harvard as an undergraduate, ten years before me – and he had ended up as a Rhodes Scholar.  (Nothing intimidating about that at all.)  It was Deacon, in fact, who had encouraged me to apply, who had been my alumni interviewer, and who – I only found out several years later – had personally contacted a friend on the admissions committee to make an extra push on my behalf.  "You were my cowgirl poet," Deacon told me many years later.  "Harvard needed one of those."