If you told anyone that I went to highschool with that I would join a sorority, they would laugh at you. They wouldn’t believe it. I don’t look or act like any of the sorority girls you see in the movies or on television. I never planned on doing it, it just happened. I fell in love with the organization and the girls in it. A few months later, after an exhausting relationship, I broke up with Greek Life.
Now, before we get into this, you should know something. I still have great hope for what Greek Life can be, but there are things that have to change. I fell in love with Greek Life because I loved all the volunteer work members of Greek Life do. You can see hundreds of different Greek organizations come together to raise money for a cause at least once a week. That’s hard to find today in a world so divided. Greek Life gives you a family, people who rely on you and who you look towards when you need help. The bones of what Greek Life is are good. I still have some friends who are a part of Greek Life and they love it and I did too, once upon a time.
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Now, I know what you’re thinking. You think I couldn’t handle the hazing. You would be right, more or less. I could handle it, but I hated it and I wasn’t shy to let my future sisters know. I didn’t follow their rules and they weren’t okay with that. But I stuck it out. I crossed and became a sister. It was a hard transition for me, to sudden be on good terms with the people who made my life miserable for the past month and a half. But the problem didn’t really happen until next semester.
Seeing the pledging process from the other side was really hard for me. I wasn’t prepared for that. I thought pledging was going to be the toughest part of being in Greek Life, but I was wrong. Watching the pledging process was harder. It’s ultimately why I left. I would try to go around the rules and help the pledges in anyway I could to make their lives easier. But I was caught and got in trouble with some of my sister.
There seems to be two schools of thought for members of Greek Life when it comes to pledging: Those who think “I don’t want anyone to suffer the way I did” and those who believe they suffered, so why shouldn’t they? I’m a part of the former group, and there are more of us than you think. Although, most of them seem to stay in Greek Life.
I hated being embarrassed and punished for just trying to be a part of a group. It was bullying at it’s finest. I didn’t want to do that to anyone else. I wasn’t going to make them jump through hoops just to become my sister. I didn’t think it was right. I wasn’t going to be a part of it, so I left. My sisters understood, they saw how it was tearing me up to be there. I would cry before going to pledging sessions and would leave in the middle of them as well because I couldn’t watch. I left my organizations with promises from my former sisters that we would remain friends and that worked for a month, but ultimately it didn’t last. I’m a demerit on my old organization’s history. A story they will tell new sisters and a part of a quiz pledges will have to take.
Don’t let the members of Greek Life fool you. Hazing in inevitable. It happens in EVERY organization. The levels of hazing are different from organization to organization. The hazing in my former organization was less severe than others. But it’s there. I stand by my decision to leave. I couldn’t go along with something that didn’t feel right to me. My morals were different than those of my sorority’s and I chose mine. I wrote this piece for those of you who are considering joining Greek Life, weighing the pros and cons. A lot what we see and hear is about hazing and how it goes wrong when you’re in the middle of it. But no one talks about what it’s like to see it from the outside. It’s just as painful, maybe even more so, because you’ve been there. You’re reliving it every time you watch it happen. For those of you who are in Greek Life and think there is no way out, there is. It’s a hard and lonely path, but it’s worth it in the end. I became myself again and found true friends, ones who didn’t make me jump through hoops to let me in.
