Hey friends! Today, I felt like sitting down and writing about how I ended up in a sorority. I think the stories like mine are really important in the grand scheme of Greek life, because a lot of people like me don’t ever join for thinking that they don’t belong. That’s what I thought, too. But that’s why I want to shed some light on my experience. Storytelling is a powerful tool for empathy and for change, and with both of those things in mind, I want to talk about this really vital piece of the puzzle that is my college experience.
In order to explain the whole story, we’re going to need to take it back a bit…to the summer of 2017, when I first moved to college.
I was on vacation in Oregon with my dad’s whole side of the family — aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents included. One afternoon, I was chatting with one of my older cousins, who had just graduated from college. She had been in a sorority at her university and loved it, and she wanted to know if I was rushing, too.
I pretty much laughed it off when she asked me, thinking that she couldn’t be serious. Me? A sorority? Not. A. Chance. You couldn’t pay me to join an organization where everyone clapped along as they sang annoyingly energetic songs from inside their big fancy house on Greek Row. In my opinion, Greek life was for the self-absorbed, party-crazy girls who had belonged to the “it-crowd” in high school. And of those three criteria, I fit zero.
