I love Kyla Tompkin's straightforward solutions! Don't mince your words to a self-answering (self-bragging) question. Just confidently state your opinion, and it's okay to not understand and be corrected! Something that we've been discussing during lecture is how academia prizes and rewards perfectionism and mastery over knowledge. I am still learning, but when I was first reading theory, I wanted to always perform mastery over a text, and would prepare exactly what I would say for some academic clout and personal validation. It wasn't until entering upper division Feminist Studies courses that I realized that the students that I respected the most were always asking the most provocative questions, ones that I had never even considered to think about the answer for.

Something I've thought about and continue to think about is ahbout intuition and "guts." This idea that trusting your own knowledge about the world ("trust your guts") often fails to account for the systems of power and dominant thought that "infiltrate" what we know and understand as intuition, or "guts." Your first gut reaction might be racist, sexist, classist, or any of the repeated rhetorics we've been taught living in our society. I've been attempting to retrain my "gut" to rethink about danger (and who's considered dangerous), feelings (considering my feelings might not always be truth), and accountability (how to properly repair harm when my gut does what it's been programmed to do).