I get a lot of shit for transferring out of Mather, a LOT of shit. Sometimes, people just tease about it but there are other times when they genuinely wonder what the fuck I was thinking. Like I said, it’s a House known for being highly spirited and there’s a semblance of actual community, which is rare at Harvard. People don’t understand how someone could choose to leave that community.

Maybe I wrote this entry out of frustration because I get asked about why I left all the time. The honest-to-god truth is that I never felt entirely integrated and I associated the House — specifically, the dining hall — with way too many bad memories. It’s not at all the House’s fault. The tutors and my resident dean were AWESOME to me when I was going though rough patches. The social activites were unmatched. Mather was really, really fun. But I didn’t feel welcome, and I didn’t feel safe. I never really warmed to the House, because I always sensed this weird hostility.

I don’t know if I’m making up the hostility in my head. What I do know is that when people talk about me behind my back in Currier, it at least doesn’t get back to (or worse, heard by) me. This wasn’t the case at Mather. This isn’t an accusation that the people I used to live with routinely dissed me either, since Mather has a much greater influx of non-residents in general. I’m sure plenty of the dining hall convos I overheard were between non-Matherites, not my neighbors.

Then again, when I went to Harvard-Yale and stayed at Yale’s sister house for Mather, I stumbled upon a definite diss, the first and only all junior year. And it came from a Matherite’s mouth. The first evening in town, Jason was drunk and passed out, so I spent the night with him at Morse College with Matherites rather than finding the Currier kids. I woke up to someone talking about “Lena Chen’s STI clinic.” I was SO PISSED. I didn’t say anything to the guy but the second Jason woke up and we walked out, I told confirmed with him that my ears didn’t lie and proceeded to yell into an open Yale courtyard, “I HATE MATHER! I AM SO GLAD I DO NOT LIVE IN THIS STUPID HOUSE ANYMORE!!” It was a stressful weekend in general. At the time, I wrote on Sex and the Ivy:

“It’s instances when I’m witness to said terrible things that I get riled up and am reminded of all the reasons why I’ve done so much running away from Harvard over the past year (transferring to Currier, frequent weekend trips to New York, etc.) I mean, I was sleeping in the common room assigned to people from my former House. How is that supposed to make me feel about Mather kids or my supposed peers or even Harvard? It’s stuff like this that makes me think for every time I bear witness to mudslinging, how much slung mud has gone unseen or unheard of?”

It’s speculation that made me so depressed and anxious as a sophomore. I always wondered if people were talking about me or looking at me, and it would’ve been crazy to wonder all that stuff except for the fact that I was often right. Which would only make me even more paranoid. I know that at Currier, I feel safe. I never ever wonder if the kids behind me are talking shit. I always have someone to eat with, but I’m okay eating alone too. I walk around the House feeling like a normal person and not someone who has to watch her back. Altogether, things just feel different. I don’t know if something within me changed between last year and this one, or if it really is the House that’s made the difference. Maybe both.