“Breakthrough’s academic enrichment is notable, but perhaps even more deserving of praise is the subliminal work that it did for me as a child that no textbook could have offered: a masterclass in community until I could world-build on my own. It is a characteristic that even at my most formulaic pulled and returned me to a crucial truth — that in the pursuit of one’s self, every child deserves to wander, to stray from well-trodden paths for their own sake in search of their purpose or otherwise.”

– Heavyn Lee, Breakthrough Miami Scholar, Class of 2020, Teaching Fellow Alumna, Harvard College Graduate, Class of 2024

Heavyn’s Story

It is an honor to be here today. Thank you to the Breakthrough Miami Team for entrusting me to share what is surely just a page out of the book of Breakthrough stories that you have carried out to publication over the years. I would also like to thank the THesis Hotel for holding space for this event in such a generous capacity. It is my first time here and I have to admit that I am strangely drawn to the name. Thesis, a word that would conjure harrowing images of late nights fueled by coffee and rearranged chapters for my newly graduated peers only a few months ago, here, now, takes on a new grandeur, encouraging that we “get lost” in all it has to offer. It is an approach to life that reminds me of the route I took to Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart as a Breakthrough Scholar in middle school. Around seven in the morning, waiting for a yellow bus to pick me up from Miami Gardens, the beauty of being the first stop on the route, in addition to having your pick of the seats — not under the AC unit or on top of the bump that makes room for the wheel — was that I could go back to sleep and squeeze in a full REM cycle. And when I woke, I was greeted with a land akin to paradise and funny enough, a garden by a different name: El Jardín they called it. Tall hedges that scraped the sky, hand-carved lore chiseled near the roof, intricate tiles to walk on, and in the center, after passing through a grand entrance, was a courtyard with a fountain. In fact, if you stood in just the right spot, that fountain overlooked another fountain in two different directions. Over time, I came to know which door had a narrow staircase that led you through a winding tunnel out onto a pool guarded by limestone — a morsel of the ensorcelling view of Biscayne Bay.

An undulating unpaved path here, a peacock spirit guide there, this, was the backdrop to which Breakthrough encouraged me to explore, offered a safe place to go missing, and guided me along a path of which I myself was the destination. Of course, at the time, I don’t think my observation was nearly as astute. It’s like when you watch a movie you loved as a child, and then you rewatch it as an adult and you are stunned by the sheer genius of its messaging. Even in a place as beautiful as Carrollton, though, where I had my best high-achieving academic years and even became a Breakthrough Miami Teaching Fellow while still in high school, the writing was on the sun-baked terracotta stucco walls as it were. 12 Advanced Placement (AP) exams later, a near perfect GPA, President of Student Government, member of the swim team, Spanish-speaker, stereotypes scared to see me coming, I found myself with an acceptance letter to Harvard College. I had gotten really good at what my mother calls “proving it on paper” and even better at hitting milestones. While taking my first coding class to fulfill a requirement for statistical analysis, in a lull period, a girl who I was working on a problem set with asked me a question that sent me spiraling: “So, what’s your thing.” It was then, that it dawned on me that in an institution where everyone had stellar GPAs, gone to great lengths to serve their community (some having non-profit organizations), and had been dubbed their hometown hero, a thing was something that differentiated you from others. And in this pursuit of a thing, I became formulaic. I took a class at Harvard Law School. I applied to internships at the Public Defender’s Office and spent two months in Mexico on Immigration Law. I even applied to raffles to win LSAT practice materials. The law became the thing I was pursuing; and on a set path that I knew worked, I chased board positions, accolades, and resume bullet points that made me an attractive applicant. On this pristine route to success, though, somewhere along the line, I quickly found it incredibly difficult to do even the things I had once enjoyed. As you can imagine, school work, commitments to my community, and activities that brought me joy were hard to balance, one or two rungs often sacrificing itself for another. Reading and the written word that I once revered were whittled down to deadlines and empty discussions about books that could at best be skimmed. Any decisions I made to lose myself, in the Harvard that I had been foretold was riddled with resources and brimming with opportunities, came at a cost. It sounds dramatic, but the cost really was my being.

The term ‘breakthrough,’ if you don’t watch your step, carries a force that suggests the program is in the business of creating a singular eureka moment in time, as if life before middle school could be labeled BC — Before Carrollton in my case. Really though, the best feature of a breakthrough is that it is a recurring phenomenon, an active promise of continuous inner work and, as exhausting as it sounds, change. It’s still disorienting, but Carie Mae Weems, an artist whose work I get lost in frequently, posed to the graduating class at the New York School of Visual Arts the following question: How do you measure a life? Yet another earth shattering question aside, despite what little an etched in stone syllabus allows for, I measure mine in the tangents I complete, the walks I took in Mexico City paired with the photos of ornate doors in my camera roll, in the framed artwork loaned from the Harvard Art Museum that sat above the closed up fireplace in my dorm overlooking the Charles River, in the gut feeling to join the Harvard Radio Broadcasting Station in my last semester just so I can play a Jersey Club Mix of SZA’s Snooze and I Want You by Madonna on the same night and later cover Santigold’s concert in Boston, in the time I spent broadening the soundscape of a vinyl record room that had gone unused for years, in the Letter Lab that I co-hosted to revive the art of handwritten letters and inkwell dipped pens, in borrowed Zipcar accounts to pickup a couch off Facebook Marketplace that my friends and I talked on for hours, in the pile of books I checked out in preparation for close-knit poetry readings I attended with my House Dean, in the things, plural, girl from freshman STAT class, that I didn’t dare save for later.

Breakthrough’s academic enrichment is notable, but perhaps even more deserving of praise is the subliminal work that it did for me as a child that no textbook could have offered: a masterclass in community until I could world-build on my own. It is a characteristic that even at my most formulaic pulled and returned me to a crucial truth — that in the pursuit of one’s self every child deserves to wander, to stray from well trodden paths for their own sake in search of their purpose or otherwise. It is because of these so-called distractions that in a matter of weeks I will be shadowing curators and interior designers in London on a post-grad travel fellowship funded by the College. Breakthrough gave me the literal room to simultaneously be and to become. It took one too many $50 late fees on Zipcars to get back to that feeling, but like the Carrollton site, the objects we select in our home are storied, how we arrange them another layered volume still. My first chapter in this program forged two far and unlikely factors through what I now consider to be a yellow chariot of sorts, until they were commonplace. In my next one set in London, I will be in my most experimental form yet, practicing a thesis of grand proportions. As it stands, I am willing to admit that Norwood Water Treatment Plant down the street from my old bus stop is no fountain, but when I return, I’ll be tending to gardens of my own, not having learned that one finds community or that it finds you, but that community is made, sourced, and furnished. ♦