Thank you to the peanut gallery

Although I initially found her advice to be bizarre, I soon realized what had motivated it: The shark tank of anonymous diatribes lingering below every article like a trapdoor.

I dutifully obeyed my mother for three years, but after being asked to apply to Opinion at the beginning of my senior year, I caved.

Since then I certainly have had my fair share of experiences with the peanut gallery. In the comments section of my first article, I was purported to be sleeping with the entire cast of a play because I had given them a positive review. In another, I was called an annoying feminist. And finally, I was accused of being arrogant, trashy and meta.

I can assure you that all of these are completely and totally true.

But for all the attacks, I also owe the peanut gallery a thank you for providing some wonderful encouragement and, more importantly, for teaching me a very valuable lesson. At Princeton, self-preservation seems to sometimes be the name of the game. If campus reactions to Suzy Lee Weiss’s article in the Wall Street Journal have left us with anything else besides the bitter taste of white privilege in our mouths, it’s the fact that we as Princetonians feel the need to justify that we are not merely an admissions mistake. And so we are left with a visceral fear of screwing up or being criticized.

Although we are bombarded by disingenuous assurances that students of all experience levels are welcome to apply to dance groups filled with people who could jete before they walked, we are conditioned to avoid those situations that can bring about embarrassment and rejection. Certainly, we see this enough when half of the infamous CHM 303: Organic Chemistry I class vanishes after the first exam. I saw this when I watched a friend drop a class because she recognized that she knew the least about the subject of everyone in the precept and saw another exclaim on the final day of a gender studies seminar that she wished she would have taken more classes like it at Princeton. I myself am graduating with two pass/D/fails I have never used for fear of looking like a bumbling idiot in classes that certainly intrigued me but that I feared would challenge my academically-weak areas. While I enjoyed the courses I took in their place, I wish I had been a little more fearless about opening myself up to a variety of activities and courses that would have been frightening but also enriching.

When my mother discouraged me from writing for the ‘Prince,’ she was hoping to protect me from a medium that would ultimately try its hardest to bruise my ego in a school that sometimes seems as if it is in the business of kicking its students’ butts. However, writing for this newspaper has helped me not only treat criticism as water off a duck’s back, but it has enabled me to experience the joys of expressing myself that I would not have felt had I been too shy to endure the worst that the peanut gallery had to offer.

I leave Princeton with such love and gratefulness for the experiences I have had. I am thankful to the ‘Prince’ for this opportunity to be able to express myself and grow a thicker skin, to no longer fear criticism and baseless attacks on my character, to find humor in the fact that a bunch of over-caffeinated, stressed-out students were unable to realize that my use of the made-up word “pangustatorial” was a joke.

When I was asked to write this goodbye column, I wondered what I would be able to offer up as 800 or so words of parting sentiments that would not seem pedantic or masturbatory. So what I have written is a product of wishing I had more than just two semesters at the ‘Prince’ to reflect on and a sincere hope that you all will find some way to throw yourself into the firing line. Whether it be joining one of our school’s grab-bag of a cappella groups or taking a class so far removed from your major that you may not even have known that such a thing existed, I hope you are fearless in the face of possible failure. And I hope that you will not wait until you are seniors to do so.

Lauren Prastien is an anthropology major from Fair Lawn, N.J. She can be reached at prastien@princeton.edu.