Integration One Boennighausen 1 Integration One 15 October 2021 Strengthening and Creating Beliefs Throughout the first two months of Moreau class, I’ve learned a lot about what I didn’t know I believed and confirmed a lot of what I believed prior to coming to college. Through each week’s content, I got to explore some of my inner feelings and develop new opinions on how my life applies to different concepts. I believe that some of my biggest failures in life so far have been not even attempting to try new things that I want to do. I think most people think that failure most commonly occurs when you try something and don’t succeed. While that has happened to me many times, my biggest regrets come from the things I don’t even try in the first place. For example, I’ve always loved theater, but I didn’t make enough of an effort to get involved with it in high school. I’m not good at singing, and I’m self-conscious around other people, so I thought auditioning would be embarrassing. Not being able to predict or control what would happen if I tried to join theater in high school, I was hesitant. As I watched Rene Brown’s TedTalk about vulnerability, I immediately thought of this experience when she mentioned that her “mission to control and predict had turned up the answer that the way to live is with vulnerability. And to stop controlling and predicting” (“The Power of Vulnerability” by Brené Brown - Moreau FYE Week One). I realized, although I think I already knew deep down, that if I had allowed myself to be vulnerable and auditioned for high school theater, something great could have come out of it. Even though this failure to act might be worse than at least trying and failing, there is no point in which success cannot be a consequential result. Father Kevin Grove’s talk mentioned a lot about how it’s difficult to grow and succeed without failing first (“Two Notre Dames: Your Holy Cross https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Qm9cGRub0&feature=youtu.be https://notredame.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=859bc1a8-0d0f-4eb4-a1c1-d0a45c429187 Boennighausen 2 Education” by Father Kevin Grove - Moreau FYE Week Five). After I failed to pursue my love of theater in high school, I immediately seeked out opportunities at Notre Dame. I am now one of the Assistant Stage Managers for the fall musical being put on by PEMCO, the student-run theater company on campus. Not wanting to miss out on any other opportunities to try new things, I also joined the Ultimate Frisbee Club right away. Although it could’ve easily been another failure to learn from, this step out of my comfort zone was an overwhelming success as I’ve found a welcoming and fun community! I believe that I am constantly searching for ways to defy stereotypes. When talking about implicit bias in class, we were given a set of statements such as “I don’t have to be ashamed of my significant other in public.” While I am extremely privileged to not have related to most of the statements, the last one aligned with my experience as a girl. More specifically, it aligned with my experience as a girl who plays a lot of sports. There is a stereotype, of course, that girls are not athletic. Even though that’s not necessarily true, implicit bias ensures that it’s almost always the first thought that crosses someone’s mind when they think about who can and cannot play sports (“How to Think About ‘Implicit Bias’” by Keith Payne, Laura Niemi, and John M. Doris - Moreau FYE Week Seven). One thing I pride myself on is proving that I am, in fact, pretty decent at sports. I’ve always loved smashing this stereotype because I’ve played sports for as long as I can remember. Something that has helped me embrace this part of me was reading the Where I’m From poems in Week Six of class. Where you are from usually results in people naming a city or country as a response, but the poems we read used experience, objects, and concepts to describe the author (“Where I’m From” by George Ella Lyon - Moreau FYE Week Six). In my poem, I mention the dirt in my softball cleats and the plastic trophy from the competitions my cousins and I have every holiday. These experiences I have with sports both https://notredame.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=859bc1a8-0d0f-4eb4-a1c1-d0a45c429187 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-think-about-implicit-bias/ http://www.georgeellalyon.com/where.html Boennighausen 3 perfectly encompass “where I’m from” and help me combat implicit bias by smashing stereotypes. I believe that I do not have to force faith upon myself to find internal value. In Week Two, we talked about Adam I and Adam II as being representations of striving for external success versus internal value (“Should You Live for Your Resume or Your Eulogy?” by David Brooks - Moreau FYE Week 2). Considering Notre Dame is a Catholic university, I feel pressure to find internal value through faith or religion. The problem with this is that I’m not super religious and faith is not a central part of my life. This clash in preference makes the pressure to find internal value seem more difficult. When we talked about our faith journeys a week later, I was hoping to find some clarity about my situation. But as we read stories about the faith journeys of Notre Dame students, all of them who didn’t already feel that faith was a key aspect of their day-to-day life said that they eventually did after coming to Notre Dame (“Student Reflections on Faith” by Campus Ministry - Moreau FYE Week Three). Reading those stories did not relieve any of the pressure, but I’ve decided not to let that affect me. I think one of my strongest characteristics is that I usually don’t let what everyone else is doing force me into doing something I don’t want to do. Even if it seems intimidating or awkward, I can switch into a “don’t care” attitude that lets me go about my day with a more positive attitude about who I am as a person. I’m not saying that I’ll never become religious or faithful; I’m just saying that if I ever do, it will be on my own terms. I’ve enjoyed all the content in Moreau so far because it has both strengthened beliefs I already had and created new ones by driving me to make an opinion. Moving forward, I hope to continue engaging with content that challenges me to reflect on myself in ways I never have before. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlLWTeApqIM https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YVemqUBaAs5DNBPYm806TyQZr3F0xElP/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YVemqUBaAs5DNBPYm806TyQZr3F0xElP/view