By Steven Yang ‘23
As part of the annual Community and Equity (C&E) Day activities this year, St. Mark’s invited Darryl Bellamy Jr. as our keynote speaker, a motivational speaker who runs Fearless Inside. “Fearlessness” was a central theme in his talk, an emotion he described uniquely. To Bellamy, fears aren’t something that is unhealthy or shouldn’t exist. Instead, by having fearless moments, students can stop being inhibited by their fears.
To connect with the audience, the high-energy talk began with Darryl collecting the fears of the whole St. Mark’s community. From failing to meet lofty expectations to having difficult conversations, students had a variety of fears that were anonymously collected. By reading many of these fears out, Darryl was able to connect on an extremely personal level with individual students and the community as a whole, despite only being here for a short time. Additionally, after promoting fearless moments, he touched on a second facet of creating an inclusive community: grace. He described three levels of people: friends and family, people similar to us, and strangers. According to Darryl, we tend to give the people we know the least the hardest time when they make mistakes—a natural trend he pushes for the St. Mark’s community to reverse to become more cohesive and well-knit.
He concluded the morning speech by reflecting on his own experience overcoming his fears, and his own “fearless” moments. Sharing a meaningful experience about losing his bid for student council president in his freshman year of college, he shared a part of himself that grew after facing difficulty, then overcoming the fears that came with it. Darryl handed out Fearless bracelets—black bands with “fearless” written on the inside, which he’s given to thousands of students all around the world. By wearing these bracelets daily, as many St. Markers have, it serves as a reminder to be fearless, and that no one is alone in the process.
Students were given time to discuss the talk with their dorms shortly after the presentation. Some shared their challenges and aspirations that Bellamy was able to remind them of, and others had a critical discussion about what many of his speech topics meant.
Throughout C&E Day, students were given many different perspectives on what really creates an open community with a positive culture and sense of belonging for everyone. Keynote speaker Darryl Bellamy Jr.’s talk was an important part of this that many may not have expected to hear in the beginning. You often hear the phrase “to love someone, you have to love yourself,” and Bellamy’s talk takes that into stride. He believes that, only when people can have fearless moments and give one another grace, a community truly reaches its highest potential.