everything i think i’m not (rush, part 2) by Caleb M. '27

In the many days prior to Kresge Kickoff, I kept saying it, kept thinking it. 

Passing conversations during Orientation training—What are you looking forward to this year? I’m gonna rush, because I’m everything I think I’m not. Do you know anything about Greek Life? Not much, but I will soon, because I’m everything I think I’m not. Hey, what are you up to on Saturday? I’ll be busy being everything I think I’m not, at Rush. 

I think I kept repeating it to myself in the hopes that if I said it enough times, told enough people about it, then maybe, just maybe, it would finally become true.

Day 1: The Kickoff

If you’re unfamiliar with how frats operate at MIT, they are all collected under the umbrella of the Interfraternity Council, or IFC, which acts as their collective government for the various internal and inter-community affairs involving MIT’s 25 fraternities. To begin the week of rush, IFC hosts the annual Kresge Kickoff in which each frat sets up a table under the tent on Kresge that’s used for Orientation affairs such as Convocation, and all the (mostly) frosh guys go around to the different tables and talk to the brothers of different frats and get these little cards that have all the different events that each frat is hosting on them. Thus, I reasoned, there was no more authentic way to start my rush experience than at Kresge Kickoff.

Stop one on kickoff day was, of course, the entrance to the Kresge Tent. Set up at the entrance were a few tables, hosting two things: 1) pizza, and 2) the 2025 Rush shirts. Every year, for Kresge Kickoff, IFC designs a shirt that says “[YEAR] IFC Rush” and has some design that includes all of the different frat letters somewhere on the back. As I was walking up to the tent on Kresge that Saturday afternoon, I remember looking quite closely at these shirts on the table at the entrance. They were baby blue, with “MIT IFC 2025 KRESGE KICKOFF” on the front and an illustration of the Student Center and a pedestrian crossing sign covered with a bunch of stickers, each displaying the letters of a different frat, on the back. I’d seen the Rush 2023 and 2024 shirts around, donned by my fellow ‘27s and some of my ‘28 friends, and always thought of them as a bit of a symbol more than anything, signifying that this MIT Man had gone through the Rush Process, had did the thing. 

But as I stared into the hypnotic pastel of this year’s tees, I got the overwhelming sense that this was a turning point. Once I picked up that shirt, it meant that I was committing—I was committing myself to this journey, to this change, to Rush, whatever it would bring. There was no going back, no returning the shirt, no returning the experience, once I decided if I wanted to get a medium or a large. I’d only ever seen those shirts on frat guys—and in getting one, I was telling the world that I was ready to become what I’d only ever thought of as “one of them.” It was a bit scary, a bit odd, and took some imagination to see myself wearing that shirt, both literally and metaphorically… but it was also strangely, thoroughly, exciting, visualizing myself as everything I thought I was not. And with that image in mind, I steeled myself, grabbed my IFC 2025 Rush T-Shirt, and took my first step into Kresge Kickoff.

Under the tent, I found myself in the center of MIT’s controlled chaos, with a few hundred guys milling about between the different parts of the crowd. Each of the 25 frats had their own table with their Greek letters emblazoned somewhere visible, staffed by a few brothers in shirts that betrayed their allegiances as members of one frat or another. Every now and then, the frats seemed to send out a few guys into the foray of frosh to find their future pledges, equipped with a handful of event cards and a phone number for quick access to the frat van/car/bus (? looking at you here, Skulls). It was loud, it was hectic, and it was just about what I expected of Kresge Kickoff.

I decided to navigate the tent clockwise, starting from the entrance and walking by each table, pausing for a moment if it caught my eye and chatting briefly with the brothers if I found myself so inspired. One thing that made this whole affair notably different for me than it was likely intended to be was, however, the fact that I was rushing as a Junior—I’d already formed a lot of pretty strong notions about the different frats from stories and friends and experiences, and I knew that I wouldn’t have the wide-eyed stupor of a first-year seeing Greek letters for the first time. Thus, I already had a kind of shortlist of frats I was looking at, mostly because I knew brothers already and had spent some time around each—Theta Chi, Nu Delta, Sigma Nu, maybe Zeta Psi—and, contrastingly, a shortlist of frats that I was particularly not looking at rushing, which I will not name here, perhaps in the interest of their reputations. Regardless of this, I tried to keep an open mind, and I stopped at a lot of tables to say hello to some of the brothers, talk to guys I knew, dap a few of them up,⁠01 Dap is actually a practice rooted deeply in Black History, dating back to Black Soldiers fighting on behalf of the United States in the Vietnam War. Standing for 'Dignity and Pride,' it was used as a sign of solidarity between men who felt that they had been thrown away by their country. I recommend <a href='https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/giving-dap'>this quick read</a> if you'd like to learn more. and grab an event card to check out what might be going on. Was it awkward? Sometimes, yeah. I felt a little bit out of place, and I got the feeling that some of the brothers noticed that I was a bit out of my element—this was definitely NOT my comfort zone. And as this awkwardness built, my sense of hesitance built along with it. Was this not right for me? Should I not be here? Can the guys around here tell that I’m not used to this?

I was particularly caught up in this train of thought about halfway through the tent when—“Caleb! Hey!” I turned at the sound of my name to see Kayle O. ‘26, waving from the Sigma Nu table. I walked over to her and we chatted a bit—she was a friend of the house, and she was helping staff for Kickoff. I told her about how I was feeling regarding Rush, being everything I think I’m not, and how Kickoff already had me feeling a bit strange about the whole process. In her infinite wisdom, Kayle told me very sincerely that she thought my reservations were holding me back from trying something new, encouraging me to continue rushing without paying mind to feeling like I would or wouldn’t fit into a space. She reminded me that the whole point was to explore something I hadn’t done before and told me that, against my own worries, she could totally see me as a brother of a frat and I shouldn’t let my own thoughts hold me back.

I can pretty sincerely say that this conversation saved my Rush experience from ending the moment I walked out of that tent. With a renewed sense of belonging, or at least a sense that I’d belong anywhere I wanted to, I thanked Kayle for the pep talk and kept walking to the remaining tables on the other side of the tent. 

After a few more slightly awkward conversations in which I felt like the most noticeable things about me were the way I talked, the fact that I was Black as a reason to be either overlooked or tokenized, or my Brass Rat signifying my not-frosh-ness, I slipped the several different frat cards into my back pocket and prepared to leave the tent when two guys approached me—which, interestingly, had not happened many times throughout Kickoff. “Hey there; how’s your kickoff been?” said one of them. “I’m Nathaniel. Nice to meet you.” We had a short conversation, and I noticed that it was very… normal. I was not being smothered by frattiness, but I didn’t feel like these two guys were particularly removed from frattiness either. They just seemed like guys who wanted to talk to me. 

“We’re brothers of SAE. You should come check us out this week.” I hadn’t heard of them before, which was pretty surprising, but also intriguing in that maybe Rush wasn’t as squared away into predetermined lists as I had expected. Nathaniel handed me a card and (after the obligatory “Wait, are you Habesha?” that seems to happen when any two Ethiopians meet for the first time on campus) we said our goodbyes, bookending Kresge Kickoff for me as I walked back into the sunshine outside of the tent and pulled out my phone to shoot my friends a quick Voice Memo (“you won’t believe where I just got out of…”) as I walked back to Simmons to decompress and think briefly before chugging a Monster and launching into what makes Rush Rush: the events. 

Rush, really, boils down to a big game for everyone involved. For the rushers, it’s about finding what fits for you, which community meshes with your sense of self the best and is the most fun to be around over the course of the week as well as convincing the people already in that community that you’re worth accepting as their newest Pledge. For the frats, on the other hand, it’s a competition for who can put on the best show. Which frat is the coolest? Which does it the biggest, blows the most money, has the most fun? I’m pretty confident that everybody knows that the paintballing, jet-skiing, steak-and-lobstering, and so forth is not actually the experience of being a brother of a frat, but all of us suspend reality for the week and immerse in the illusion—and the fun!—of it all. People go to as many events as they can, rushing or not rushing, to get free food and enjoy the actually really fun events that the frats pub on the little cards you find littered all around campus in that week before the semester starts. A handful of these events are recurring and become sort of a tradition for the frats, a few of those become pretty well-known throughout campus, and one stands out as probably the most iconic event of MIT Rush and was the first event I found myself at—ZP Car Bash.

Imagine, if you will, a car. Imagining one? Good. Now, take out all of the windows and mirrors, drain it of all fluids, and set it up in a parking lot with some cinder blocks by the tires to make sure it doesn’t move. This is the scene you’ll find at the beginning of Zeta Psi’s Car Bash. The event starts by handing a bunch of 17- to 20-year-olds a bucket of cans of spray paint and unleashing them on the car to graffiti every square centimeter of the exterior with anything their minds deem funny, interesting, or crazy enough to spray paint onto a car. Once the car is thoroughly… designed, let’s say… everybody but a group of about four rushers stands back. That group of rushers is handed safety goggles, gloves, and most importantly sledgehammers, and as a ZP brother sets a 5 (or something like that) minute timer, the guys run at the car, attacking it with all the energy they can muster and destroying anything they can get their hands on—hence, Car Bash. After this group finishes, the next one is up, and the cycle of destruction continues until either the car is sufficiently beat up or the event comes to an end. Anything you get off the car, you get to keep, so if you ever see spray-painted car doors around campus, those are the spoils of ZP’s Bash!

Car Bash was a hell of a good time. I’d always seen videos of the event and wondered what it would be like (also a bit of a theme throughout my entire Rush process) and, now, here I was! I was already a bit nervous about Rush at large, and I had some energy to get out after Orientation closed the day prior, and Car Bash was a great way to do just that. I beat the living crap out of that backdoor.

One moment in particular that stood out to me came as a group of guys was, after about an hour of different squadrons working on it, trying to get one of the doors off. As they were whacking away at the hinges, the rest of us looked on, and I remember one of the frosh going, “They’ve got to twist it!” to the rest of the group of watchers. He was right—they weren’t going to sledge through the last part of the connectors straight-on; they had to twist it around the hinge to get the door off. So, naturally, I yelled to the guys attacking the car, “TWIST IT!” 

Unexpectedly, in this moment, the frosh around me turned and seemed to shush me a bit, surprised that I would share our realization with the other guys. I was pretty taken aback by their somewhat hostile reaction, until I realized—they were first-years, and classes hadn’t started yet. To them, the other guys were their competition, and if they succeeded at getting the door off then anybody who didn’t have their hands on the door at that very moment had lost; the only victors were the ones who’d ripped it off the suburban. Comparatively, I didn’t see any of the other guys as my competition: everybody had beat that door off the car together, and it was the culmination of everyone’s effort that led to the ultimate success, regardless of who actually “got” the door in the end. The “collaborative, not competitive” thing was really shining, and I was the only one around who thought through that lens because I was the only one around who had actually been an MIT student already.

Nonetheless, Car Bash was great, and even though I didn’t get any pieces of the car as a souvenir, I walked back to my room carrying the sense that Rush had finally really begun. 

To close out the first day of my potential new life as a Frat Guy, I spent a few minutes at one of the many Rush Parties that were being thrown that night—a watered down, ultra-packed, exceedingly humid and sweaty version of the fabled MIT Frat Party. Because of how extremely packed it was at the house, my friend Elijah R. ‘27 and I went upstairs to sit in our friend’s room for a few minutes and get away from the intense haze and cloud of bodies partying for the first time. 

In this brief time sitting, I spent a lot of time thinking very carefully about where I wanted to actually rush. The frat that I was sitting in at the moment was, at least in my view, particularly “fratty,” and throughout the night I noticed various small things that put me off of the idea of participating fully in or committing myself entirely to that kind of space. I realized that there was some part of me that, regardless of how “everything I think I’m not” I was, didn’t want to be changed as a function of me being in a frat; I wanted, regardless of who I was or wasn’t, to be true to myself, to the values I held at the core of my being. I worried that, if I were to rush a really “fratty” brotherhood⁠02 the only way i could avoid saying "a fratty frat" and immerse myself in that environment, I would have to put on a “mask” to fit into that way of being because it would not be natural for me. I wondered, at that moment, how long I would continue to wear that mask before it started to look like it was my real face.

And in that moment, looking in the mirror in my friend’s closet, faced with the choice between a mask for the sake of whatever I was rushing for or my truth for the sake of my sense of self, I knew that I wasn’t going to gun for the frattiest of MIT’s frats—I knew that I would choose my countenance.

Day 2: Something, Anything, Everything

I spent much of Sunday, honestly, not doing rush. After realizing that I wasn’t super into the frattiness of… well, of the frats, I was now kind of lost as to where exactly I wanted to end up with rushing. I didn’t feel super connected with a lot of the groups that I met at Kickoff, and my list of targets was already getting shorter. I didn’t really want to go to any events, and I felt weird texting brothers of random frats to pick me up in gigantic vans outside of Simmons, and I had some other stuff that I needed to handle that day, so I fielded the texts that I was getting sent from people I’d given my number to at Kickoff with a “I’ve got work at the radio station today, but thanks anyway!” and generally continued just thinking about, and not actually participating in, Rush in general. 

As I sat in the Walker Basement that afternoon, I remember feeling like I was coming to a bit of a dead-end; Rush definitely didn’t feel like it was over, but I also didn’t really know where to go from where I was at. I didn’t want to fling myself into spaces where I was uncomfortable, but at the same time I did—that was also sort of the whole bit. I didn’t want to betray my values or sense of self, but I also reasoned that if I was going to be everything I thought I was not then I had to somehow diverge from what I believed myself to be or what I believed myself to believe about myself. I wanted to try being more than I was, somehow different, but I also knew that so much of this entire experiment was about being accepted as I was. How was I supposed to make all of these contradictions mesh—more importantly, how was I going to get them to mesh in less than a week?

As I was thinking, I found myself scrolling mindlessly on Instagram to distract myself, and at one point I went to my DMs to see a message from a brother of one of the frats—Nathaniel, who I’d met at Kickoff the day prior. I remembered the brief conversation we’d had the day earlier, and remember how overwhelmingly normal the entire affair was. It was one of the few moments at Kickoff where I felt almost completely natural; more normal, even, than when I’d spoken to my friends at their own respective tables. Weirdly, I found that from our conversation, it appeared that his frat was able to bear a lot of those contradictions that I’d been facing: I didn’t feel uncomfortable in the conversation, but I was still stepping out of my normal activities by a very function of rushing. I felt like I was still being myself, but that I could be myself as a frat brother. I could grow, but I also felt like I could be accepted as I was at the moment. 

At first, I hesitated—I hadn’t heard of his frat before, and I’d already kind of swiped past his message beforehand. But in that moment, I realized that that was the perfect motivator: I had no preconceived notions of the community except that it didn’t seem overwhelmingly fratty, and I could go in with a fully open mind, which made this the perfect opportunity for my Rush experience to be as authentic as possible. Even as I went back to my work, something about it was poking at the back of my mind: give it a shot. You never know.

And as I parked my BlueBike and walked up to the purple-painted door of SAE, I took a deep breath, readied myself to start a slightly different Rush experience than I’d expected, and with some sense of a turning point somewhere soon, lifted my fist and knocked.

…which was met with no response. I knocked again, and it seemed quiet, so I reached for the door handle and peered briefly inside to find the house empty. Had I missed the event, and perhaps this shot at something new?

But, upon DMing Nathaniel back briefly and asking if I’d missed the event, I learned that they were actually just out back, which makes sense because the event was Surf and Turf and it is a bit difficult to man a grill inside a house. Nathaniel came from around the block and, after the expected pleasantries, walked with me back to the event!

After spending a bit more time with Nathaniel, I continued to make the rounds and met a handful of other brothers—Jonathan, Addison, Lance, and more—and recognized a few from my time at MIT, namely Eddy who had been my TA for 8.01 and Thomas, manning the grill, who had been my CPW child freshman year, along with a few familiar faces from walks up and down the Infinite. I had some shrimp (Surf) and steak (Turf) as well as a cup of Arizona Green Tea and chatted about different things with everyone; I told Addison about how believing that “Life is Short,” Lance about WMBR and my love for music, and Jonathan about being everything that I thought I wasn’t and why I was rushing as a Junior. The conversations were actually all quite nice, and the guys were the same—I remember Lance excitedly finding Tommy, founder of MIT Live, when I told him about how much I loved music; Addison came across genuinely invested in understanding my perspectives about life while also sharing his; and Jonathan seemed in staunch support of my adventure with rushing and trying out something new to get out of my comfort zone. It was a really good time, and at one point some of the guys started playing a bit of music on some guitars (if my memory serves) that I recognized as the intro to Frank Ocean’s Pink + White; so, naturally, I started to sing along. It was interesting—for whatever reason, even though I’d just met most of the guys around me within the hour, I felt comfortable enough to perform the vocals for this song in the spur of the moment. It was, honestly, a really good time.

After a brief tour of the house and stopping by some of the guys’ rooms, I went around and said some goodbyes to the guys I’d met that day. “Do you want a ride back? We should be taking the van back to campus soon,” one of them mentioned. “I’m all good—I’ll just bike back,” I replied; I wanted to bike myself back through the city. And as I put my AirPods in and blasted my biking playlist, I sped through Boston with a smile on my face. I had tried something new by taking myself to SAE that day, and as I flew past brownstones and over bridges, an exciting echo rang through my mind: the sound of the opening of a new, bright purple, door.

Days 3 and 4: The Rush Part

The next few days were the most quintessential to rush: more events! At this point in the week, everyone seemed to have settled into which frats they were mainly looking at and planning on rushing, and at the start of Day 3 I had settled into focusing on SAE and Sigma Nu.

I kicked off this next phase of Rush by sitting outside of Simmons, waiting for one of the vans. As mentioned, these vans are pretty… thought-provoking, one might say. They’re thoroughly decorated with various images and designs (evokes Car Bash somewhat, besides the extreme destruction) drawn in some sort of washable marker, and they’re often used as an on-demand shuttle service between campus and the frat houses for whatever event they might be hosting that afternoon. The shuttle I was waiting for, however, was not headed for Beacon Street and Frat Row. It was actually headed the opposite direction—far north, where with Sig Nu, I strapped on a helmet and filled up a magazine with pellets for a few rounds of Paintball and pizza in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. 

I remember myself being… okay at best? at Paintball. We did a huge war arena, (my team won and I didn’t get eliminated!) a smaller outpost-style enclosure (I totally got eliminated), and then finally went to war during Capture the Flag in the forest out back (which my team won again!). Quite notably, I remember not being chosen last (and actually being picked rather early) when the captains were choosing their teams, which definitely made me smile; the contrast between high school was salient, and I liked the feeling of being wanted in a space. That sense was a big part of Rush too—the wish to be not just accepted but wanted in a space. I knew that Rush involved a lot of selection, especially on the parts of the Frats to choose who they would continue rushing; thus, to be rushed by a frat was to be selected, to be wanted for the qualities that you possess. It was a feeling that I hate to admit I was pursuing, but it was also one that was actually being satisfied in the process of rush even before the week was through.

After Paintball, we returned to the Sig Nu house for some barbecue and chatting, and it was all a swell time—I chatted with some of the brothers that I knew, hung out with some of my close friends that were also friends of the house, and had some pretty exceptional barbecue (and, as a Texan, I have high standards for barbecue). Through the whole thing, I remember not feeling out of place or excluded from anything—it all felt very natural, and I rarely felt like I had to put on any performance of who I was to not “stand out.” 

The next day, with SAE, I found myself in even-middler-of-nowhere Massachusetts at Skeet Shooting (aka shooting clay targets with shotguns), which I had only ever seen at the shooting range down the road from my house (again, Texan). The van ride to the range was quite long, but it was a great opportunity to continue talking to the different brothers and scoping out how good of a fit SAE might be for me. Again, I felt for the most part comfortable through the event; though the conversations did feel a bit different than the way I usually spoke to my friends, I think a lot of that could be chalked up to the fact that we didn’t really know each other, and I had the realization that I could see myself, in my authenticity, being close friends and having long, casual conversations with the SAE brothers, which I couldn’t say about a lot of the frats I’d interacted with in the past few days.

Skeet shooting itself was a grand old time, and by the end, I was able to successfully shoot two targets in reasonably quick succession. Which, sure, sounds unexciting, but was actually quite a milestone (because I had been missing too often and needed to prove myself before we left). We rolled out in the two SAE vans and stopped by some ice cream shop with a funny name that I can’t for the life of me remember before returning to campus and getting back to the daily affairs. There was much to do, as the next day was the first day of classes, and so after being dropped off (at, in fact, the MIT Admissions office for my first Blogger Meeting!) I returned to my room to ground myself for the coming year, to think about everything I’d done these past few days… and, it seems, to begin to doubt.

Day 5: Everything I Am

The first day of classes was, of course, a whirlwind. Actually, it was fine, because I had exactly one lecture, but nonetheless. The sense that I was stepping into a new phase of my life should have been familiar, what with how many such steps I’d taken in the past few weeks, but it was still just as much of a smack in the face as ever. And though Wednesday was light, I knew the next day was going to be looong, and I was… not exactly looking forward to it.

Throughout the day, I spent a lot of time thinking about my experience so far with Rush. I didn’t plan on going to any events that day, and I noticed that I was feeling pretty drained come Day 5 of the whole process. I wasn’t even going to all that many events, to be honest—yet somehow, I felt worn. I realized that I had spent every single moment of the day thinking about Rush—rationalizing, considering, weighing, wondering, reconsidering, parsing, realizing, contemplating, convincing, deciding. It was consuming my every waking moment as I tried to fit this unfamiliar paradigm into my familiar lifestyle, and it was starting to feel overbearing.

Were the events fun? Yeah, for sure. Were the guys I had met people I would want to call my brothers? I would say so, yes—I was surprised by how welcomed I had been by the community. Was I accepted in the spaces I stepped into? I was, fully.

But was this right for me? And why, exactly, was I doing it?

Was I looking for a community? Not really, no; I was already surrounded by rich, diverse communities at my every turn. I had my friends from Simmons, my freshman year neighbors, my radio friends, the EESA, my Orientation teams, and more. I felt in no way at a lack of community, and the fact that a fraternity happened to be a predominantly male space didn’t make it more intrinsically valuable than any other space I found myself occupying. And I’d already promised myself staunchly that, if I were to end up in a frat, I wasn’t going to allow it to take away time that I spent with the communities who had accepted me without a week-long trial. I was already surrounded by love. And I was fulfilled with it.

Was I trying to prove that I could do it, and to whom? If my motivation was sticking it to those guys from my high school, then that meant I was still giving them power over me because I was doing all of this just to show them that they were wrong. Just like they did in high school, they were dictating where I could and couldn’t go. But what about where I wanted to go? Only I could drive that. And if I was trying to prove to myself that I was capable of being in a “men’s space” without feeling out of place or excluded, then I’d already done that through Rushing—and it felt like an insufficient motivator to support me going all the way through with the process, even if I were to receive a bid from one of the frats.

Was I forcing myself out of my own skin out of dissatisfaction with the person that I was? Signs pointed to yes. I felt like I wasn’t enough of a “guy” sometimes, in how I spoke and dressed and carried myself and thought about the world around me. And I felt like others saw it too, and I noticed it. I always noticed it. When guys would treat me a bit different than the others around me. When they would dap up my friend and then just awkwardly say hey to me. When they seemed less jovial, less funny, less outgoing when I was around because they couldn’t use the same jokes or the same words when I was in their space. Every time, I noticed, and I carried—I carry—it. And as friendly and welcoming as the frats that I found myself rushing were, there were always moments that I felt like I had to be just a little bit different than I usually was. Tell different jokes. Use different words. Laugh at different things. I wanted to fit in so badly that I was showing the world someone else, someone slightly better than me, expecting that if they accepted him that they would accept me too, knowing that wasn’t really how it worked but thinking, praying, that it was my best shot. But I was never going to get anywhere if I kept forsaking the person that I knew myself to be in exchange for someone that I could present myself as so that a small group of people might like me a little bit more.

And most pivotally—was I Everything I Think I Am Not?

I was. 

But I was also Everything I Am. And I found myself wholly unwilling to rip myself out of the context of my life, out of my beliefs, out of my voice, out of my self, to try and craft someone else for the sake of proving someone wrong about me—for that matter, to prove myself wrong about me. Because, I found, I had only proven myself correct: about my values that I would safeguard staunchly; about my voice that made me who I was; and about where I could fit in if I so chose—anywhere. There were no bounds on who I could be, no guardrails to where I could grow, but I also found that there was so much that I already was, and he deserved to be considered, cherished, celebrated too. I had to stop rejecting the person that I was in exchange for someone I thought I “wanted” to be.

And so, I modified the mantra—because I wasn’t just everything I think I am not.

I am everything I am, anything I’m not.

Day 6: Would You Be Happy?

In finding this deep resolve with myself, the next day it came time to make an important decision: was I going to continue rushing? It was fun, and it was an adventure, but my motivations felt flawed. I didn’t want to turn myself into someone else when I’d just come to terms with the person that I was, but I also wanted to live in the moment and try something new. 

I was bouncing back and forth between continuing Rush and choosing to eject myself from the whole affair when I received a particularly frank text from Sydney P. ‘27, who I had been talking to extensively about my difficult position:

would you be happy in a frat?

And the answer was shockingly clear: no, not really. Or at least, not happier than I was at the moment, as she clarified in the next message (which I left out above so that the one line could have more dramatic weight). 

And, in that moment of clarity, it became obvious that I didn’t want to continue Rush. Changing myself to fit in, chameleoning for the shot at community, it wasn’t going to make me happy. I had had a lot of fun, definitely, but if I was going to Rush, I wanted to do it for myself—for the boy I already am. I wanted to show him to the world and let them accept or reject him as they pleased. But that wasn’t what I had been doing, and I didn’t want to continue on that path knowing that the cost of it would be me. And in coming to terms with it, I came to terms with myself as well. 

That week taught me so much about myself, as I found myself telling Noah R. ‘27, that night. To quote some texts that I sent him—it showed me how much I value community and how I put time into the people that matter to me. It showed me that I didn’t really need a “strong male community” because the people who embraced me embraced me for who I was, and the diversity in those communities is what made my life so vibrant and the perspectives I was able to share in so meaningful. It showed me that, really, I was wholly disinterested in rewriting the person that I already am to fit into someone else’s image of me or to seem acceptable to a community whose validation served no purpose other than fulfilling a sense of exclusivity and homogeneity. It showed me that “a chance” from a bunch of people who would probably laugh at me behind my back if I wasn’t retaining a careful mirage to impress them is ultimately worth nothing at all except the knowledge that I can put on and remove masks of my persona to chameleon into spaces rather than be content with the spaces that have accepted me maskless.

And as he asked me if I was happy that I had rushed, the answer flowed from my fingers with ease.

i’m happy that i rushed because i learned i didn’t need to.

Day 7: The Last Hurrah

It was Friday. Rush lasted for most frats until either Friday or Saturday, when they would host their Bid Dinners and then tell the invited rushers that they had received a bid and were welcome in the brotherhood. SAE was the only fraternity that I was still rushing when I decided that I was ending the process, and a part of me had almost hoped that they’d forgotten about me. The guys were all friendly, I felt happy in the community, and I could see myself spending more time around them, but I knew that for my sanity and my sense of self, I couldn’t keep Rushing this semester, and I didn’t want to have to break that news to any of the guys that I’d met that week.

Unfortunately, I had no such luck, and as I woke up that morning I found an Instagram DM from Nathaniel inviting me to a dinner on Friday night, which he particularly noted was the last event before the bid dinner on Saturday.

I really liked Nathaniel, and Jonathan, and Addison and Lance and Tommy and Thomas and Eddy and Minh and Jacob and everyone else that I’d met. They were funny, and the conversations that I’d had were rich, and I didn’t feel all of the pressures to be someone else when I was around them. Separated from the context of everything I wrote above, I’d be perfectly happy to show up to the dinner that day, accept the suggested invitation to the coming bid dinner, and go forward with my life as a brother of SAE. But I knew that that separation was impossible—we exist in the context—and thus, I knew that I wasn’t ready to be in a frat. 

And so, with a bit of a heavy heart, I wrote up a reply to Nathaniel—thanks for inviting me to dinner tonight […] i’ve come to the decision that i’m not going to continue the rush process, at least for this semester […] i just don’t think this is the right moment and course of action for me and where i’m at right now […] i really appreciate everything from this past week and hope to still keep in touch!! thanks sm

I looked over the message, and in it I felt some resolve. I went in on my own terms, and I was stepping out on my own terms. I’d done Rush just how I wanted to, and I’d found more of myself for it. It wasn’t the outcome that most guys would hope for—a bid—but it was exactly what I wanted it to be: an opportunity for me to grow and learn about who I was, a chance for me to take the reins of who I could or couldn’t be. 

And thus, I took a deep breath, readied myself to mark the end of my wholly unique Rush experience, and with some sense that the turning point had found me already, lifted my finger and hit Send.