Changing the World Takes Believing You Actually Can

When I was seven years old, I discovered I was adopted. My first request was to meet my siblings as soon as possible. My beautiful parents, Betty and Gilberto, driven by the profound love they have for me, agreed, and we traveled from Pitalito, Huila, Colombia, to a small rural
town to meet them.

Nineteen years have passed since that day. And inevitably, I have asked myself: Who would I have been if I had grown up with them?

Where would I be?

How would I speak?

What dreams would I carry?

How would I dance?

Those questions never left me. But they gave me something without me realizing it: a deep conviction that we are not born into
who we become. That we are shaped. By experiences. By people. By words.

When I arrived at HGSE, I found the space, the people, and the voice to ask better questions: What experiences mark, shape, and transform us?

What people change us?

What words matter to us?

What makes us who we are?

The answer shifts the more I think about it, but there is one variable that remains constant, one that shows a significant positive association with becoming who I am today: Did you hear that, Professor Joe?

That significant positive association is: Someone believed in me.

During equity class, with professors Stern and Bray in our very first week (I know, it’s been a while), I realized that my identity was entangled in what others had decided I was. The names I had been called, the pain I carried, my class, my gender, my nationality, everything I was never allowed to be.

I discovered, a little later in a conversation with a dear friend, that I had built my entire sense of self around the suffering others had given me. As many of us do.

But then I thought of my parents, who were certain I was a singer, a dancer, a writer, and a poet while I was growing up. My favorite teacher who knew I could go to university. My sister, Isa, who believed I could achieve anything I set my mind to, an unstoppable dreamer.

Harvard, which looked at me and said: “you belong here.”

And of course, I can't forget my students, who believed I was a performance actor, only there to entertain them until next class. They weren't entirely wrong.

So… here is what I learned at HGSE: Changing the world takes believing you actually can. Not the naive kind of belief that ignores how hard it is, but the stubborn, grounded kind. The kind that others planted in me.

So when people ask me what I intend to do with my HGSE degree next year, in ten years, or in 20, my answer is short: Creer. Believe.

Believe in our children when the world stops offering them a second chance.

Believe in our power when the room fills with fear.

Believe in our voice when it gets shaken by the loudness of others.

Believe that others can also change.

Believe for the ones who have lost the ability to believe in themselves.

Let us be grounded in belief when the world chooses not to. Let the legacy we leave be guided by the good we inspire, the words we say, and the lives we touch. Let us rise, not only beyond what has defined us but also toward what we can become.

Because someone believed in us.

Now it is our turn to believe.

Creer!