Emily Hoeven | Intellectual weight-lifting

Growing Pains | Why we need to become comfortable with uncomfortable situations

By Emily Hoeven 10/06/15 1:21am

I was leaving my constitutional law class the other day when I noticed that my shoulders were so tightly scrunched up against my neck as to almost inhibit me from putting my backpack on. I slowly lowered them and remnants of stress leaked out from between my shoulder blades as they relaxed. I felt like a turtle sticking its head out from its shell, and really, the analogy was not too far off.

My constitutional law class is one of those classes where you don’t have to participate. Our participation grade is based almost entirely off of clicker responses, which allows for passive, stress-free articulation of opinions. However, the class is also completely discussion-based. So while participation in the usual sense is not directly part of your grade, you feel an inherent obligation to contribute to the discussion and be an active member of the class. When I sit in that class and don’t raise my hand — not because I don’t have something to say or I don’t have a question to ask but because I worry that what I’ll say will be redundant, ridiculous or regrettable — I feel this oppressive weight on my shoulders. I feel burdened. I feel as if I have to guard, preserve and defend my intelligence. And I illogically attempt to do this by not speaking.

Similarly, I was recently with friends who were discussing a topic that I didn’t know much about. I found myself smiling and nodding along, trying to make my comparative lack of knowledge as unnoticeable as possible. A couple of minutes later, the conversation somehow shifted to English literature, and I immediately started talking a mile a minute about my favorite books. The disparity between the two levels of my engagement and participation in the conversation was blatantly obvious. I felt as if I had stepped off a tiny piece of shaky, fractured, vaguely defined land onto a sturdy, stable surface whose boundaries, lines and features I knew like the back of my hand. I went from feeling uneasy and uncomfortable — like I would be exposed at any moment — to calm, confident and comfortable in what I was saying.

I should have felt relieved that my insecurities went undetected in constitutional law class and my conversation with friends. But the more I reflected on it, the more I felt disappointed.

In giving into our cowardly impulses to hold our tongues, we think that we are saving face, protecting ourselves from potential mistakes and maintaining our current state of dignity. “What will others think of me if I ask this question?” “What if my answer is wrong?” “I know much less than everyone around me, so I’m not going to contribute. I don’t want to look dumb.” We’re so focused on hiding what we perceive to be our faults and crafting our personas so none will be the wiser to our internal anxieties, that we don’t realize we’re also preventing ourselves from becoming wiser.

Building intelligence is like building muscle. You don’t get stronger from lifting weights that are easy for you to lift. You get stronger from lifting weights that are a bit too heavy for you to continuously lift comfortably. Your muscle fibers break down, but then they rebuild themselves, and next time you lift you’re ready for a heavier load. We didn’t come to Penn to spout knowledge we already knew. We didn’t come here for the stable ground. That would render the whole point of college moot. We came here to learn things we didn’t know before. We came here to challenge ourselves with difficult classes and talk with people who would present us with new perspectives. We’re here to ask questions and to answer them — both correctly and incorrectly.

To only speak when you feel like you’re an expert on the subject is to take the easy way out. To only raise your hand when you’re 100 percent sure of the answer is to limit yourself to a box that doesn’t allow for growth. To worry about how you look in front of your peers is to let your educational and intellectual experience be dictated by others. To stay silent is to tell ourselves that our voices aren’t as meaningful, profound or knowledgeable as others’; it is to tell ourselves that we blew it before we even begin to speak. And those are messages that we receive loud and clear.

EMILY HOEVEN is a College sophomore from Fremont, Calif., studying English.  Her email address is ehoeven@sas.upenn.edu. 

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