A quick note before reading this post: This post grapples with some really complex issues that I am trying to understand and make sense of. I am not a professional and have not lived through some of the things I’m writing about. This is only my perspective on this topic based on my own experiences and the context of others’ experiences that they’ve shared with me.

As I’ve matured over the last four years and gained a greater understanding of emotions and how we process them, I’ve begun to better understand how those emotions dictate our everyday actions, how we treat other people, and how we see the world around us. Having had the opportunity to get to know many different types of people on a profound level because of state office, my fraternity, and college in general, I’ve come to realize that most of us are stuck with emotional baggage that can make it hard to progress forward and affect our thought processes and how we treat other people. This week, I had three realizations that have helped me understand how our past issues and emotions can ripple out into the present:

Realization #1: Negative experiences cannot be bottled up forever, and the emotions associated with them have to be processed at some point.

When my friends and I returned from Shasta, we all had a collective realization that our time together was ending. Truth be told, I had a mental breakdown the last night we were at Shasta because everything hit me all at once that I was about to graduate and leave a community that I had grown so much to care about. But after having that time to be sad about it, I felt much better. One of my friends went through the same breakdown last week, but he didn’t feel better. I noticed he was a lot angrier and more upset than I had seen him at any point in the last three years of knowing him. When we talked about it, a lot of emotions came up and out into the open, and it wasn’t about graduating. He talked a lot about past memories that bothered him, and a couple were traumatic in hindsight. He spoke of his frustrations with family members and the issues with our fraternity and how a recent situation of another person we know going through a bad breakup brought up echoes of a relationship that he had in the past as well. The stress of graduation and our families coming to visit, compounded by other triggers that brought up these old memories, hit him all at once. It felt so overwhelming that he didn’t know how to even begin to think about it, so it caused a bad reaction. The issue he points to is that he’s tried to avoid thinking about it for so long because he didn’t want to deal with the reality of those bad experiences.

The way that I see this realization is that everyone has baggage that they hold onto. But we can’t carry it with us forever. And we can’t avoid thinking about it forever. Bad thoughts and memories are like an annoying alarm reminding us to do something we don’t want to do. When something reminds us of that bad experience, negative emotions remind us of that bad experience or trigger. We can ignore it or shove it away, like when we hit the snooze button or hit close on that reminder to fill out that application. Still, the reality is that those feelings do not go away. It can be buried, locked away, or dampened due to intoxicants, but it simply does not change the fact that what we went through is still with us and still affects us. We may not even realize it until a stressful situation forces those emotions front and center. The issue with my friend is that he’s spent four-plus years ignoring what has been bothering him. Since that time, other problems have compounded and made what he is going through even worse because he didn’t know how to process it and didn’t want to. But he’s starting to process it right now and working through those issues, instead of trying to shove them down.

The issues that we face are scary, but we can’t hide and run from them forever.

Realization #2: Past traumatic experiences can adversely affect how we treat others, knowingly or unknowingly.

One of the most interesting parts of our childhoods to me is that the experiences we went through as a child can dictate how we operate as teenagers and adults. Those formative years in our lives ripple out into the people that we become. When damage is done to someone, it can acutely affect them in ways that go deep into their personality and mindset. And sometimes, that damage can be difficult, if not impossible, to fix.

The best reference that initially gave me insight into this was the Netflix show BoJack Horseman. Still, it helped explain how someone I knew unraveled entirely last week. In the show, BoJack grows up with neglectful parents, contributing to issues later in life exacerbated by fame. For most of the show, we see him grapple with those issues and identify where it all started, how it affects him currently, and how those issues have resonated to a point where they have negatively influenced his actions that harm himself and the people around him. This parallels another issue that happened this last week where someone that I know cheated on his girlfriend, and everyone, including his girlfriend, found out about it. I won’t detail the actual breakup itself, but it was messy, and he tried to lie about it. The situation got even worse because he tried to drag other people, myself included, into it by attempting to cover his tracks and freaking out on people when he got called out on it. From my knowledge of interacting with him, he has previously spoken about how past trauma in his childhood has affected him. You can logically deduce that the trauma is coming up now in this situation by trying to lie and manipulate into justifying his actions, as well as affected his mindset that led to his actions in the first place. We can’t assume anything about anyone, but his now chronic cheating and lying have come from a place in his past that has negatively affected him. In the TV show, BoJack does whatever he can to get what he wants without regard or caring for others without initially knowing why he is doing it. Only when he was able to identify that past trauma did he even begin to process how it rippled out onto other people through his words and actions. Even then, there were times in the show where he blamed his actions on his past trauma. And similar to the situation I witnessed this last week, we can’t blame actions that harm other people on our feelings and trauma. We have to accept responsibility and begin to move forward. We cannot use our terrible pasts to justify being awful to one another. And BoJack, like the person involved in this situation, will have to realize that at some point or another.

The issues we face can be traced back to an original source, and resonating behavior can be rationalized, but it cannot be justified.

Realization #3: Progress through emotional processing isn’t linear.

The last realization I had regarding the concept of trauma relates to me trying to process my time as a state officer. Before I get into this, and for anyone reading this who went through the same/similar experience, there are a couple of notes I have on this before I explain:

A) I am not trying to be a victim of an experience I wanted to have

B) I am not ungrateful for the opportunity that was given to me; I am only trying to process emotionally what my teammates and I went through

C) I am in no way comparing my experience in that position in the context of the pandemic to anyone else’s traumatic experiences. My experience is entirely my own and

D) I am only writing from my perspective and analysis of my own experience as I now feel that I’ve comfortably (but not completely) processed it.

The best way I can describe my state officer experience and all of my teammates is complicated. The experience itself was highly rewarding but also profoundly frustrating; a time when I felt connected yet so inextricably alone, when I was told to be a role model, but I felt so highly insecure about myself. An experience where you were told you were critical but also jammed into the backseat of any decision-making. Sitting with me were five people freshly transplanted from their entire livelihoods to sterile dorm rooms going on a year-long journey where we got shut down every step of the way because of restrictions no one could control. And at the end of it, we walked out of a recording studio after giving the most important speeches of our lives thus far, wondering, “What in the f— do we do now?” But so many little moments of laughter, genuine connection, and heartfelt stories gave me a sense of purpose. It was all so bittersweet, but I never felt I got the closure I thought I deserved because of the pandemic, and those negative parts we went through stuck around with me as I tried to slowly process it in the years after.

I would go weeks without thinking about that year, and then something would happen where I would think about it again, and those negative emotions would rise back up. I thought I had processed it after a conversation with an old teammate or helping out at an event, but then something would happen, and it kept bringing those emotions back up. It would drive me crazy because I couldn’t just let go and fully step away. I thought I was owed something, anything, from the association for the issues that I was going through. To end it all, I got banned last December from going back and helping out because I provided some state officers with alcohol when the same thing was done to me during my year. I accepted my part in that, but I felt it was ridiculous, and it only reinforced those same negative feelings. Even after three years, I still hadn’t mentally processed my experience.

After December, I took time to reevaluate my perspective on that year of my life and the difficulty I had getting over it. It made me more understanding of myself and allowed me to realize it was okay to have these negative thoughts. But it taught me that sometimes in life, we sometimes never get the closure we deserve, and we can choose to accept that experience for what it is, even if it wasn’t what we wanted. There were still learning lessons. I still did something meaningful. But there’s simply nothing I can do to go back and change it or do anything to fix my gripes with how the experience is now and what it does to people like me. My closure was the realization that I was never going to get closure from that year and how my relationship with FFA ended. Sometimes, an episode of your life doesn’t have the happiest ending. But maybe that’s a good indicator to start taping a new season instead of trying to watch the reruns and see if anything changes.

The issues that we face aren’t going to get resolved on a set timetable, so give yourself patience and understand that it happened for a reason and that you’ll find a way to move past them if you keep trying.

We all have problems, but at some point, we need to face them. We need to understand how and why they started and how they’re affecting us now. But the journey to resolving them isn’t neat and linear. So give yourself grace and keep trying to be a little better than you were yesterday.

-Colby