Resetting at 32: My Harvard Era

I'm back! After a break from the pod, I've returned with a life update and reflections from my first year as a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School studying religion, ethics, and politics.

This episode is for anyone navigating a major life reset (whether school, career change, move, etc.). In the middle (or on the precipice) of big changes, life often gets scary, and doubts are ever-present. But often we find that the leap of faith only makes things brighter. You're more resilient than you think. 

Then, this episode rounds off with some things I love (“so my ministry”) and some things I don’t (“not my ministry”). Go in peace! 

Topic ideas? Comments? Questions? I’d love to know! Faithfullyuncool@gmail.com

About Faithfully Uncool:

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Email: faithfullyuncool@gmail.com

Transcript

Welcome Back After Grief

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi everyone, I'm Jasmine. Welcome to Faithfully Uncool, a space where we talk about Christianity, spirituality, and life. Whether you're Christian, another tradition, or none at all, come on in, have a tea, and let's learn something new about faith and everything in between. Man, does it feel great to be back doing the podcast? Friends, it has been a while. Um, for those who may not know, Faithfully Uncool started back in, I want to say maybe 2022, kind of off and on. And I took a break in 2024 after the passing of my mom. Um, and really am just in a life period that I have completely sort of reset myself, and it's been really exciting. I feel really grateful and happy for the first time in a while. Uh, for anyone who's been through major loss, you probably know what that is like. You never really get past grief. That's not how grief works, but you do have moments where your life starts to grow around the grief. I think that's the best way I've seen this talked about and discussed by far is that your life starts to get bigger versus your grief getting smaller. It's always there, but life just steadily grows. And thankfully, I'm in a period I feel where life really has grown.

Resetting Life At 32

SPEAKER_00 1:39

And I would love for this episode to be about my reset and also just tips on what it's like to kind of reset your life. And for me, that looks like being 32 and resetting my life by going to graduate school. This has been a longtime dream of mine. I am currently a student at Harvard Divinity School. And thus far, I've really loved my time here. I've really enjoyed it. But it's also interesting to be a student who is not so removed from their undergrad experience or so far away from their undergrad experience. At this point, it was about 10 years ago, but it took me a while to kind of find my bearings. So I feel in a lot of ways very similar to how I felt when I was doing my undergrad experience, but also have the knowledge of work experience that I have built up over the years. And so it's interesting to kind of be situated, I think, in the middle of the experience of coming directly after undergrad or coming even many years after uh undergrad for, you know, your third master's degree or second master's degree or things like that after a very full career. So it's been interesting to be a student that kind of is situated in the middle of different experiences, and that's a huge plus of the program, too, because you just meet so many people in different places in their life, and everyone can teach you someone something new, and it's just really cool and really enriching in that way. And so coming back to school does carry its own unique rhythm, it's very different. Um, I am personally in the Masters of Theological Studies or MTS degree here. My area of focus is religion and politics, but because I cannot help myself, I also take a good deal of classes that are in New Testament or Christianity focuses. So that's been something that has been really exciting to sort of learn so much and to soak up so much. It's been really, really thrilling because my graduation year is 2027. I'm in a program that's only two years, so it's just really exciting to take up as much space and class time as I can. But then 2025 was an insane year, y'all. Just insane. That was the year that I actually moved here to begin the first year of my program. And I had a major surgery. I was moving from the DMV, DC, Maryland, Virginia area to Boston, and I'm not familiar with Massachusetts or the New England area really at all. I would not consider myself, I would consider myself a little bit more familiar than I was last year, but I definitely wouldn't say that I'm an expert in it now, to be honest, because you do have a little bit of a bubble, or you could argue a lot of a bubble when you're in a university. So yeah, with that, I just wanted to share some things about this reset in my life because it's been so interesting to be spending like my early 30s in school again. And I always knew that I wanted to return to school to get my master's degree. I've actually been following Harvard Divinity School for a while and sort of knew that it was always a place of interest to me. Applied, got in. It was the best thing ever. The time that I realized I got in was almost to the day, an exact year after my mom passed away, was when I found out that I got into the school. So when we talk about things that just feel like divine timing, that is really how coming to this place felt for me and still feels in many ways. So with one year left in my program, with being in the middle of this reset when it comes to education, when it comes to where I live and things like that, I wanted to spend this episode diving into what I have learned about myself and life in general when it comes to resetting your world and taking a risk and taking a new opportunity.

Trust Yourself And Start Anyway

SPEAKER_00 5:45

So let's get into it. So number one is a simple one, and I'm pretty sure I've shared this on maybe other episodes before, but it bears repeating because I have the hardest time doing this, and maybe you do as well. But number one is the simple yet so effective and true trust yourself and trust the process while you are trying to reset or considering a new goal or trying to go after your goal. The steps you take towards your goals do not have to be perfect, but they do have to exist. So for me in my case, I knew that I wanted to return to school. I knew that I wanted to study religion and something else, but I did not know what that quote unquote something else was going to be. And after working in DC for a little bit with the federal government, I really realized that I had an interest in political systems. I wanted to know more about it, and then I started narrowing down schools that would allow me to study both things without feeling like I had to sacrifice one part of my interest for the other. And then, of course, Harvard became a school that I considered for that purpose. But no matter what it is for you, there's probably something that you keep thinking about pursuing or that keeps coming up for you. I heard this quote one time that said, if it's your calling, it'll keep calling. And I thought that was so cool. And I think that that's really true. I think that a lot of times we are on the edge of a decision or on the edge of a choice, and we don't necessarily know how it's all going to work out. And so we're almost afraid of the success as well because we're unsure of ourselves, or we don't know how we'll have all the resources to do what we want to do. And a lot of times that stuff gets figured out on the other side of our courage, on the other side of our confidence. And so I just want to say that because I think that a lot of times I get really stuck in analysis paralysis about what is the right decision, where's the right place to go, what is right for me, what should I do? And a lot of times this comes down to trusting myself. I had to trust myself a lot when it came to applying to this school. I had not done a college application in years. So, you know, when people were saying, Yeah, you can use a paper from undergrad as your writing sample, I was like, I haven't been to undergrad for uh almost like 10 years. Like it was, you know, nine years uh out of undergrad when I was compiling my essays and writing samples and everything like that. So I really had to start from scratch when it came to what I was writing. You know, I've actually always been a fairly strong writer, if I'm being honest. At the same time, academic writing is its own thing, and I do feel like it has a tempo and a way of doing that, if you've been out of it, it's almost like putting together a puzzle piece to me, where I know what it's supposed to look like, but I don't necessarily know if I have all the pieces yet. And it just requires a different mindset. And as someone who did a lot of creative writing and had been away from, you know, writing for academia, you know, I had briefing memos and creative writing and blog posts and stuff during my absence from school, but I really hadn't written academic papers like that. I had to sit down and really give that time and attention. And I had to trust that what I was doing made sense. And I had to trust the ideas that I was putting forward in my work. And I think that that's really, really significant is to trust yourself because you can get all the feedback in the world, but at the end of the day, it's your name on whatever you're doing, and it's your life living through the consequences of your decision. So I cannot impress upon this, like upon you enough to trust yourself and trust the knowledge that you have of who you

Ask For Help And Receive It

SPEAKER_00 9:52

are. The next one really goes directly with the first, and that is to actually accept help from others. And to accept help, you might have to make the vulnerable step of asking for help and requesting it. But I think something that you'll be surprised that happens is that when you have made a decision to go forward on a goal, you'll be surprised how many people are actually in your corner and rooting for you. And if you don't have people in your corner that are rooting for you, that is a sign that you need new friends. It's like, I forget who said this, but it's one of my favorite quotes. It's it's this quote that's like, before you tell yourself that you're depressed, consider if you are surrounded by assholes. And, you know, excuse the language, but that is a good barometer because sometimes we are surrounded by people who don't believe in us or who are problems-oriented instead of solutions-oriented. And that can just be its own stressor. But in a lot of ways, in many ways, I was blessed in this way, and I think a lot of us are too, whether we realize it or not. We actually have more people in our corner than we might have considered or really known. And so while I know that sometimes it's on brand to give people this advice of move in silence, move in silence, like okay, but also there are things that require help. I was told flat out, no one gets to college, no one gets to Harvard alone. And I think that that is something that's good to remember. So I had people that looked over my work and were very honest with me. I I had like PhD students look over my work, and you know what? They they they would tell me if something sounded stupid, okay? And it was helpful. Um, other people that were willing to read over my writing and say what sounded good or what made sense or where my thesis was weak and my academic writing or where they didn't really understand what I was trying to say in my statement of purpose. Like all of this stuff was really, really significant. So I would say accept help from others and also accept the help that exists. You know, if it's I'm thinking of university now and like graduate programs now, but maybe for you it's something different. But for me, there were a lot of resources that, in particular, just speaking of Harvard Div School, but Yale Div School did this too, to be fair. There were resources that were also just free, like online and a ton of YouTube videos, especially because of the COVID era. A lot of schools had to put information about their programs online. And so they still have a back catalog of so many interviews of alumni or prior students, or all of these inform all this information about what it's like to be on the campus or study the topics that you might want to study, or just practical things about how to live and how to exist in the space that you want to. And I think that that's really important to just have access to. And so accept the help that's available and also don't be afraid to ask. I had to do a lot of things to prepare. I had to move out of my house, I had to heal from a surgery. There were people that had to be willing to step up and be there for me. And those were mainly my family and just really close friends. And I really learned how meaningful and what a blessing it is to have an incredibly just supportive community surrounding you. And I even had people that joined, I guess, that were newer to my support team in my life that I hadn't really known in in the past or hadn't really connected with, but we connected around this shared goal and shared experience, and they were thrilled to see me go for it. And I think that that's so impactful. So one thing I will say is please, please accept help and make sure that you're comfortable receiving, not in this weird way of trying to keep score or trying to tally up how much you owe someone for their help, but actually in this way of knowing that it's okay to be on the receiving end of someone's kindness. Sometimes that makes us a little uncomfortable because we feel like we might not deserve it or we get in our head about it. But it's very okay to accept that and to be ready to give it to someone else as well as you can. Of course, you should be of service whenever you can, whenever you get the opportunity. But I think that sometimes I have seen people do this, and occasionally in my life I've been like this too, not the best trait. But sometimes we're afraid of getting help or asking for help because then it's like, oh, like, do I owe them now, or how does this look now, or whatever. And it's just a lot of overthinking when many times people are actually more charitable than we might expect. So I will definitely say that to ask for help and accept the help that you get. Don't be too shy or prideful about being able to do everything on your own. There's a balance between trusting yourself and just feeling like you don't need anybody else. And many of our goals actually do require wisdom from others. So be careful about who's on your team, but definitely have a team.

Holding Joy And Disappointment Together

SPEAKER_00 15:17

The next thing I'll say, and I'll try to keep it quick because it's another simple but good one, is it's okay to celebrate the win. And it's okay to mourn the loss. All right. So fun little story time here. When your girl, Jasmine, was applying to grad schools, I applied to two schools. I applied to Harvard Divinity School and I applied to Yale Divinity School. And upon receipt of my decisions, uh Harvard got back to me first, and it was, like I said, a crazy day. I actually spent the day basically in shock. I opened my computer, saw the like I logged on, saw the decision was an acceptance. I screamed in a way that like I am so surprised that none of my neighbors in my apartment checked in on me. Um I literally screamed, and after I screamed, I just started crying. Um because you know, it just it just felt it was insane. It was an insane feeling. And I had been imagining it for so long, and you do so much for the application, and between like the application deadline and the decision deadline is at least two to three months sometimes. So for me, it just it was wild. Then a couple weeks later, I got Yale's decision, and it was a no, it was a rejection, and I remember going through my head and feeling like, wow, like I didn't feel as good about that application, and going through everything that I must have done wrong and being really down on myself, and I called my sister and it was just like I didn't get into Yale, and I was, you know, a little frustrated. I wanted both, I wanted the option, right? I wanted to be able to choose. And my sister said, Really sorry to hear it. You have an hour to get over this because I've already told my friends that you're going to Harvard. And it was one of those like really funny moments that I look back on, and I just, you know, my sister was not saying this to be callous. She was joking, is like half joking, half serious. But I think that something I want to say is like it was perfectly okay for me to be disappointed at at where I did not get into, and also be very happy at where I did get into. It's okay to hold multiple emotions side by side on the way to making a major change in your life or resetting your life or doing some kind of new beginning or starting over. On the journey to new opportunities, a lot of times we see people celebrate and we see them on the other side of their joy and of their huge win. But we don't always know what it felt like for them to have a loss, whether that was another opportunity that they lost, or whether it was in my case, the fact that I lost my mom. And while I was incredibly excited to return to school, I was also returning to school knowing that the one person I could not call was one of the people that I wanted to pick up the phone and talk to the most upon hearing those news. And so I think that something I just want to really impress upon here is there will be multiple emotions to hold in tandem while you are making any major decision or life change. And it's okay to experience all of them. Whether you want to, in my sister's words, give yourself an hour to feel what you feel and then say, Hey, life's life, I gotta move on because there's much to celebrate, or whether you just want to have a day or a week or whatever, to like mope about it for a little bit. Not because nothing is good, but just because you want to feel your feelings. It's fine. Um, you know, don't get stuck there, but it is what it is. Like we have a right to feel what we want to feel, and I think it's important to know that you can celebrate your wins and mourn and acknowledge your losses at the same time. Because the thing is, in order to accept and be excited over the yes, we often have to accept and hear and let go of the no.

Know When the Reset Is Worth It

SPEAKER_00 20:00

And lastly, number four, know when the reset is worth it. Know when the reset is worth it. And this is really about knowing and weighing honestly the pros and cons of the decision and choice that you're about to make, okay? So when it comes to knowing if the reset is worth it, it's about knowing is this something that I'm going to regret not trying? Is this something that I'm going to regret even doing? Right? Like, what if I do this and what do I have to sacrifice to do it? What can I gain on the other side? This is about being really honest about what this reset will cost you, whether it's relationally, financially, et cetera, and setting those expectations up front. This isn't about discouraging yourself from making the decision or being stuck in a mode of rumination. This is about determining whether or not the decision is being made for the right reasons. Are you just trying to keep up with someone or are you actually excited? Is this something that you think would bring you closer to the kind of person that you want to be and happier? Or is it going to be miserable and you're actually trying to fill someone else's dream and not your own? This is what it means to know if the reset is worth it. It's also not about just playing it safe, because a lot of times playing it safe isn't necessarily helpful. We actually do need to dream bigger than our current situation. So knowing if the reset is worth it is not about settling, it's about discernment. And it requires believing in ourselves enough to know that what we discern is good for us can actually happen. And a lot of times this takes changing how we think about ourselves in the first place. And it's about not self rejecting. My mother would always say. If you think that you're going to hear no, always ask. Don't treat anything like it's too far-fetched. Because either you ask and you hear no, and you're in the same position that you were before, which you already have proof that you can handle, or you take a risk and you hear yes. And so it's so, so, so important that as you are discerning if the reset is worth it, that you also understand that you are worth the reset. You have an inherent dignity and worth that no one can take away. And if you want to change something in your life, not to make it sound overly easy, obviously, if these are things that we're applying to, jobs, houses we want, places we want to go, etc., there is work that takes place. And so I'm not dismissing that, but I'm saying that sometimes we get in our head about we can't imagine ourselves in certain rooms, in certain spaces amongst certain people, and it's so important to dismantle that, to take out this idea that somehow our identity doesn't match what we want to see accomplished. If you're someone that really likes manifestation, for instance, and I'm not saying you have to be, but there's an interesting technique called scripting where you literally write about an event as if it's already happened. And I think it's such an interesting technique because it really is a good thought exercise in just helping you to not self-reject, helping you to not have this idea that what you want somehow isn't going to want you. And so, yes, we cannot control everything and it gets very hard. And there's a level of privilege in terms of how fast people can move or what they can do. I'm not discrediting any of that, but what I am saying is it's not about defining our worth based on who chooses us or who doesn't choose us. It's about knowing that our worth cannot be taken away, no matter what. And so we go for the reset, we go for that change regardless, knowing that we will not self-reject.

Resetting The Show And Listener Support

SPEAKER_00 24:12

All right, y'all. Thank you so much for tuning in as I reset this podcast and my life. It'll be so, so fun to share the things that I'm learning and share more about how life is going. And so if that interests you, please do follow the podcast. I would love if you could leave a review. That's incredibly helpful. And I want to start ending the podcast or, you know, maybe every episode, maybe not. We'll see how it feels.

Boston Winter And A TV Favorite

SPEAKER_00 24:40

But I really like this idea of doing something called Not My Ministry versus So My Ministry. And if you've listened to previous episodes, Not My Ministry, I think I used as like the title of like a news segment or something. And we might still talk about news a bit as well as you know, we're able or as I think of stuff. But I kind of want to use that, not my ministry. I kind of want to use that to talk about things that I really am not a fan of, actually. And I want to use so my ministry to talk about things that I really like. And these might be religion or Christianity or spirituality related or nothing of the sort. So today, these are things that have nothing to do with religion, but not my ministry. Okay. So something I'm not a fan of. Boston winter. Okay. I know it's a cliche. I know it's a cliche. I know everybody's like, uh, nobody likes Boston winter. Or maybe some people do. I don't know. Um, but I have to say, uh, the beginning of this year that was absolutely horrid. I have no idea what was happening. It like I'm from Northern Virginia, so when it snows, it's kind of an event. But when it snows in Boston, it's basically just a way of life. I have seen cars just buried under snow here. Uh, people put random chairs and other things in their spot, their parallel parking spot when they've cleaned it out, which no shade, because I definitely understand. First of all, I can't stand parallel parking, even as someone coming from the DMV. Like it's not my forte. It's not something that I enjoy. And so if I had to dig out a spot, you know, 30 feet of snow, I would also put a chair and a couple books, and I don't know, a stroller and whatever else I could find in that spot. Because it's mine now. I fought for that. But yeah, the winter was just crazy. It was crazy on my mental health, it was snowy all the time. It was like negative three and windy. It was insanity. So, not my ministry is Cambridge in the winter. Not my thing. Boston in the winter, not my thing. Like I just I was like, this is this is too much. It's too much. It's way too much. At moments when it should have been getting warm too. I remember I woke up one day in April and it I saw that it was snowing outside, and it actually I was actually genuinely upset. Like I took it as a personal affront. And I it's weather. Like it shouldn't, it should not be like this, okay? Anyways, just not my ministry. Okay, something that is so my ministry though is off campus. The show on prime, based on a book that I did not read and that I'm not gonna read, frankly, so don't ask. But I thoroughly enjoyed that show. That was so good. And to be fair, don't come for me. Based on the premise, I don't think it even had to be as good as it was, but it was so well done, it was so well written, the acting was great as well. I loved it, and I actually look forward to future seasons of it. So off campus, so my ministry. Boston winner, not my ministry. And that's all I have for you today, friends. Thank you so much, and take good care. Go in peace.