When an experience you highly sought after turns out to be not what it seemed, because of circumstances out of anybody’s control, how do you process that after the fact? It’s a question I’ve struggled with for years, and I finally have gotten to a place where I can honestly sit with it. What follows is the story of the thing I wanted more than almost anything, and how everything came apart once I finally got it.

The National FFA Organization (which originally stood for Future Farmers of America) supports students in middle & high school through agricultural education, offering career and technical classes alongside competitions, conferences, and leadership events. It’s both an intracurricular and extracurricular program (woven into the school day through ag classes, but also full of trips, competitions, and events outside of it), and it gives students a lot of room to explore career pathways and build leadership and social skills. A lot can be said for the benefits it provides, and that’s certainly been true for me. Some of my best memories are with my ag teacher (who I’m still friends with), my friends, and the competitions and conventions where we had a lot of fun.

The struggle came down to my experience as a state officer. FFA’s student leadership runs in tiers. Every chapter, which sits within one school district, elects its own officer team. Above that, each of a state’s districts (or regions), covering multiple schools across a broad area, elects a district officer team. Then there’s state-level leadership, and above that, national. Specifically, for state office in Oregon, you’re elected in March of your senior year, and it spans a whole year of service, requiring you to suspend going to college until you finish the following March. The election process is very competitive and (until very recently) incredibly cutthroat, with anywhere from 20-40 ambitious high school students running for six elected positions, all of it decided in front of thousands of people. The entire year, you do workshops, go on ag industry tours, meet with sponsors, hold leadership camps around the state, and travel out of the country for an international agriculture experience. There are many days of sleep deprivation, long and demanding hours, and trainings where you’re directly confronting the same teammates you competed against to get there. You’re expected to meet deadlines and work together to provide for the students and the organization. In return, there’s a real opportunity to make an impact on students and do real good for communities that need it, along with the chance to give a speech and hold a convention in front of thousands of people. If I had to describe it in one sentence, it’s being the world’s most niche celebrity in the form of an internship. If the experience sounds complicated, it’s because it is, and the only people who really understand it are the ones who did it in Oregon.

As the title of this post suggests, everything went wrong from the start, and just got worse from there.

I’ve written about this previously, but I spent at least two years prior to running for state office so mentally wrapped up in wanting it that I don’t know what I would have at the time if I hadn’t gotten it. I was prepped and ready to go, but everything changed on March 11, 2020, when convention had to be canceled because of COVID only a week before it was supposed to happen.

I was devastated and didn’t know what to do, as was everyone else. Eventually there was a virtual convention that year, and though well-intentioned, it was a bit of a joke, mostly because it happened at the literal start of the pandemic, was planned a week in advance, and no one knew how virtual anything worked yet. But the election process, which I had spent years prepping for and which my college plans hinged on, was pushed back to the end of April and moved entirely online. That weekend of interviewing, as anyone who has run for that position knows, was nothing short of hell. I barely ate for three days, mentally broke down multiple times, and sat in front of a computer screen to convince 12 high-school students why I was the best fit to lead an organization during “these troubled times.” And while there was a real sense of relief after getting elected, and after talking with my FFA friends about all the messy drama (of which there was a LOT) that happened during the election, the year and the six of us elected were doomed from the start.

One day after the election, a controversy arose regarding one of the people selected for the team. I won’t get into it, but it required all the people in charge of choosing the state officers that year (not even the students who normally elect them) had to vote to change the team and swap that person out for another candidate who was not initially chosen to be on the team. Because of the restrictions, we had to wait over a full month before we could even meet in person to do anything. For what was supposed to be a crazy experience of packed weekends crisscrossing the state from the time we were supposed to be elected in March, we spent the first quarter of the year being unable to leave our homes, and rest of the it unable to see anyone. And we had to spend it all on the computer, isolated, while everyone and everything seemed broken. Let me just briefly cover a few things that happened that year:

Less than a month into our year, the worst protests in a century spread across the nation, and getting canceled was happening to everyone left and right. COVID forced everyone online, required masks everywhere, and shut down the entire country, with Oregon having some of the most restrictive measures in the nation. The entire state caught on fire TWO DAYS after my team and I moved to Corvallis so we could at least be together, and we had to spend three weeks at the state fairgrounds in hazardous levels of smoke trying to help people who lost their entire lives. We had to watch the 2020 election and January 6th play out in real time, and sat there while every single event we thought would be in-person that fall & winter got canceled, one by one, and couldn’t do anything about it. As for my team, all of us were struggling with immense isolation and depression, away from our hometowns for the first time and physically trapped in the dorms. One of my teammates straight up had to go to the hospital multiple times for physical reasons, and a couple of others, though I didn’t realize it at the time, were struggling with serious mental health issues. Even our end-of-year convention, which was forced to be virtual, had to be paused after the first session because the ethanol plant across the street caught fire and exploded, putting us uncomfortably close to a near-death experience and forcing the entire town of Cornelius, Oregon to evacuate for 12 hours.

It was a lot. Early on in the year, our team really struggled with each other, especially with me. None of us could interact with anyone, so all of our own personal issues were just projected onto each other and it was incredibly toxic at points. We tried to shove our issues down and keep a smile on, but eventually it culminated into a screaming match and a lot of ugly tears in September. We all worked together very well, but we were all so deeply struggling and isolated that all we had was each other to take it out on. It was only after that ugly day in the dorms of yelling and frustration that healing and understanding really broke through, and the back half of the year we stayed very close, in essence because we all implicitly knew that this experience would only have gotten worse if we continued to hold each other to a standard that no one was capable of achieving because of the circumstances.

Retiring from state office is very difficult, emotionally. You spend months planning a convention and working on an address being vulnerable in front of thousands of people, only to finish convention and literally be forced to confront the next stage of your life and to live on without a major piece of your identity that you’ve built for years, which is so similar to what all the people who didn’t get elected to the position in the first place had to go through the year that you ran it. Even though we didn’t get a normal year or convention, I think it ripped all of us on that team up because we had to process the trauma of having everything beneficial of state office deprived from us and the loss of the only people who could plausibly understand what you’re going through. There are lots of people who remain close after state office, but our team was not one of them. The reason wasn’t that we hated each other or couldn’t reconcile our differences. It was, as my teammate once put it during an argument (this was a couple of months after retirement, when I found out she’d come to Corvallis to see a friend but hadn’t seen me): “it’s not that I wanted to exclude or spite you, but it was the sheer difficulty of even going into that town, let alone seeing someone from that experience, that processing everything is too overwhelming to bear.” Everyone went their separate ways and worked to process it on their own terms.

My relationship with FFA really struggled after that, because I didn’t know how to feel and trying to process that alone was so hard. It resulted in panic attacks, nightmares, and anxiety for years. I think a response I had to that was to support the teams after me in order to compensate feeling unsupported, for better or for worse, while continuing to push down any emotions that tried to surface of the very real struggle I went through. That pushing-down led me to act out in other ways. Eventually, a couple of years later, that same feeling led me to break one of the organization’s rules, and I got temporarily banned from helping out at FFA events (a ban that has since been reversed). It only compounded the unresolved grief and loss I’d been carrying but never dealt with. So in order to resolve it, I had to just leave behind any trace of that world for a while. To cope with that grief, I needed time to work through it on my own, just as some of my teammates had. I couldn’t originally see anything FFA-related, so I became a lot more withdrawn because it was just too much. It’s the same as what my teammate went through when she visited Corvallis, the place it all happened, again. It’s not that I wanted to exclude or spite anyone, but it was the sheer difficulty of even seeing something that reminded me of that experience, that processing everything was too overwhelming to bear. It was hard, but the best way to process something is to confront it, which I eventually did.

There are learning lessons worth sharing that I’ve taken away from all of this, but a couple of things worth stating before I get into that. The first is that unless you’re one of the five people who served on that team with me, it’s understandable if you don’t 100% get this post, or the weight it carries for me compared to everything else I’ve written about. The second is about state office and FFA, writ large. While that was a hard year, I do not blame anyone else for how I feel or anything that happened because of it. Because a lot of it had nothing to do with anyone particularly. It simply was a series of extraordinarily unfortunate events. What happened with that experience, and everything after it, is simply what happened. To learn and to grow is to have humility and to take responsibility for your own actions and your responses. We cannot change the past, but can move on and rectify it for ourselves.

The first takeaway that I have is that trauma is real and takes time to address. Let me be clear, what I am not saying is “FFA traumatized me.” What I am saying, is the circumstances that surrounded the 2020-2021 year, with a unique position that affected my entire life, resulted in me (and likely my teammates) being unable to process it and properly function for a long time after that. And I don’t have a writable solution to trauma as a whole. There are lots of things that are traumatic and shouldn’t be discounted when they happen to someone. And it takes a long time to really heal from that, and the path ahead is anything but straightforward.

The second takeaway is one about having black-and-white perspectives on things. Although I don’t share it in this post, there were positive moments and experiences that came from that year. To write off a whole year of my life and say that it was terrible and horrible and worst thing of my life would be to discount what FFA does and the people who really tried their best to make it good for us. That year was something that happened. I still have a close relationship with one of my teammates and can point to great moments and memories that I had with the others that I wouldn’t trade for anything. It was specifically those moments that made the experience as a whole difficult to process, because there wasn’t just one clean takeaway from it.

The last takeaway is about giving yourself grace, which I struggle to do. When I retired, I thought that by June 2021 I would have gotten state office resolved and processed and I would’ve moved on with my life. Needless to say, it took a lot longer than that. I made peace with everything about a year ago, but it was only after meeting with a member of the FFA staff last month and getting my ban reversed that I felt comfortable writing about it. Doing so meant being in a place, emotionally, where I could talk about this experience productively, both to myself and to anyone reading this. Emotions are hard. I do my best to write and process them and can share a lot of them to anyone on the internet through this journal. But I still and always will struggle with them. To do so makes us human, and it’s okay to not be okay. And I’m learning to be okay with knowing that I’m not okay sometimes. And it’s okay if you’re not always okay, either.

All in all, my team’s experience on the 2020-2021 Oregon FFA State Officer Team was not a good one. While it’s not an experience I would ever want to relive, it’s also one that I would not want to forget. I am who I am today in part because of it, and I’ve grown to accept that what happened in the past doesn’t define me now.

-Colby