When something you’re passionate about becomes a time-consuming part of your life, it’s easy to let it dominate your thoughts. The issue comes when you let that thing become your identity, and your ego gets tied to everything that happens with it. To keep a healthy mindset, your identity has to be grounded in more than one passion, or any mistake can trap you in a spiral of fear and defensiveness that threatens your wellbeing and the very passion you built up.

This is a story about how I learned that the hard way.

Every few days that term, at roughly the same time in the late morning, Stewart would walk into my room and ask if he could go to a party.

The answer was always no. He was on social probation. He knew it, I knew it, and every single time he would throw a little hissy fit, I would explain (again) that there are rules about social probation and that maybe he should have gotten better grades, and he would eventually leave. Problem unsolved. Rinse and repeat, every day for two months.

At first it was kind of entertaining and it made me laugh. By November, it had helped drive me into the biggest mistake I made as a fraternity president.

Three years ago, back in the Fall of 2023, I was finishing my year as president of my fraternity at Oregon State. Coming into the position, my goal was simple: change as much as I could, as fast as I could, and leave KO Fiji better than I found it. And as many of the guys who were in Fiji at the time could attest, we did exactly that. But by the end of the year, any semblance of work-life balance had deteriorated, and I was growing increasingly manic about hitting every goal I had set before my time ran out.

Let me tell you about Stewart. He is one of the funniest mfers you will ever meet. Between doing some of the most random bs you could ever think of, with quotes and actions that should not be repeated on this journal, I love the dude. He was one of the centerpieces of the pledge class I helped recruit, always doing the most to help out, and a lot of fun to be around. Anything he set his mind to he could accomplish. But that turned out to be a problem, as Stewart can also be a huge pain in the ass.

Here was my situation: I cared deeply (too much, honestly) about improving our social standing. But I went through four social chairs in six months because none of them could break the KD-SK-Tri Delt cycle of Fiji parties we had been stuck in for a decade, and we had no leverage with other fraternities to co-host because we were a dry house, one of only three on campus. We were not an attractive option, and understandably so. A lot of that changed when my friends and I acquired the White House, the liveout we got through pure dumb luck. But the reason we actually started improving socially was a freshman from Southern California.

I still don’t know how, but Stewart got in contact with fraternity and sorority social chairs we had never thrown with, and actually connected with them. One after another, good functions started showing up on the calendar. What I had estimated would take two to three years of investment, and would only pay off after my class had graduated, had been accomplished in a term. It was great. It was proof, against an extensive amount of dissent, that my not-so-kind-to-previous-cabinets-out-of-spite strategy of “do the exact opposite as they did” was paying off.

It also meant Stewart was instrumental to my goals. Keep that in mind. It matters later.

Because behind the scenes, the job was eating me. The demands of being a full-time student while navigating 100 guys aged 18 to 22 wore on me more every month. At the beginning of the year I could compartmentalize it pretty well: journal, reflect, keep some distance from the position. By fall, that distance was gone. More and more of my identity was grounded in being president, and my ego rode along with everything that happened to the chapter, whether it was about me or not.

Then there was Stewart. First, the mechanical bull: he wanted one for a party, I obviously said no, and he emailed a rental company rep anyway with some random bs trying to be funny. She flagged it as harassment and reported it to the Center for Fraternity and Sorority Life, which bought me an hour-long meeting explaining that it was all a joke. Then, and I still don’t know how you do this, he posted terrible grades multiple terms in a row, and withdrew from all of his classes right before the end of spring to dodge another bad GPA term. His transcript came back blank, we had to treat it as a 0.0, and our rules stipulated that our cabinet had to decide what to do with him.

The obvious move was to cut him from the chapter. But our national organization was rewriting all of its rules at the time, nobody knew how a DA trial was supposed to work, and anyone who has been in Greek Life can tell you how miserable that process is even when the rules are clear. So our cabinet compromised: Stewart and one other member went on social probation for all of fall. He technically lost his position as social chair, but we came to a down-low kind of agreement that he could still plan parties and be a point of contact, because I had no other good options (my close friends John and Wyatt, the actual social chairs, were completely useless).

I was already stretching the rules for him. He repaid me by pushing every boundary as far as it would go. If I said no, he went around me to the rest of cabinet, then to my roommates at the White House, then bitched about it in the group chat. If I had to estimate, 20% of my time on fraternity work that term was spent specifically counteracting Stewart’s bullshit. He convinced my roommate (and useless at this cabinet job) David to let him come to Parents Weekend with the “it’s not just your house, so you can’t decide who comes in or out of it” argument because we were hosting. Then, after so gracefully choreographing a dance routine that blew up a sorority philanthropy, which earned me an upset phone call from a sorority president I highly respected, he skipped town for Halloweekend and partied in Arizona, which I obviously couldn’t block him from going to. When he got back around midnight, after I had spent a sleep-deprived day helping run a haunted house for our fall philanthropy, he pushed me one more time, and we got into a full-blown screaming match on the first floor of the house that you could hear two stories up at one in the morning.

Here’s the thing. It wasn’t the tantrums that broke me. Those were honestly really funny. It was the open flouting of my perceived authority. And at that point, I wasn’t managing Stewart anymore. I was out to get him back.

My opportunity came a couple of weeks later. We had our first joint brotherhood scheduled with Lambda Chi Alpha, a house that was strategically important to me: a house that could hold parties with laid-back guys that was well-regarded by all of the sororities and fraternities. Stewart had planned our first joint party with them for that Saturday, and he had convinced their brotherhood chair to hold a joint brotherhood the night before so everyone could get acquainted. His function ban applied to “social functions,” which meant parties, but had always implied a sorority was present (who wants to party with just dudes?). But I was so beyond pissed off with Stewart finding ways to undercut his restrictions that I manipulated a majority of my cabinet into agreeing that “social function” meant anything involving another Greek house. The actual definition could have gone either way. I was determined to make it go mine, and I announced the ruling to the whole chapter via text.

Stewart freaked out. So did a couple of my other friends, who wrote me essays about how I was being unfair and how all of our rules were stupid (which I did understand to an extent, some are ridiculous). But instead of considering for even a second that they might have a point, I dug my heels in and went all-in, no holds barred: trivialize, deflect, fight back. My biggest fear was that a rebellion of three would turn into a rebellion of thirty, and I would lose control before I finished what I had set out to do. Stewart didn’t go to the brotherhood. I won that battle out of spite. But I spent the last three weeks of my presidency at war trying to contain the fallout of that blowup, keeping everyone in line while I ran out the clock.

The Lambda trap was not a brotherhood, nor the decision to classify it as a social function. The trap was that by November, I could no longer tell the difference between defending the organization and defending myself, because there was no longer any difference between the organization and myself. The rationale behind my decisions that term had slid from “what is best for the chapter” to “how can I get what I want,” and the genius of that kind of drift is that it never feels like one and always finds a way to feel justifiable. When I sent that text to the chapter, I genuinely believed I was enforcing a rule and settling a score. A position that exists to serve other people had become a weapon for my own ego, and I couldn’t see it, because by then the position WAS my ego.

And the score-settling didn’t even pay. Blocking Stewart from one dumbass brotherhood event cost me months of trust and respect with him and two of my other friends. It took a long time, and a mutual recognition that we had both acted improperly, before the friendships repaired. They did repair. We’re all still friends to this day, the chapter met every goal I set out, and we won almost every IFC award to show for our troubles. Stewart broke the rules a couple more times after that and got written up for it, but that was my judicial chair’s problem, not mine. Honestly, it should have been someone else’s problem far earlier than it was.

This is not one of those stories I look back on with a ton of regret. Stewart was no saint in that situation, and my response was a very human one. But it remains the biggest FIJI mistake I made, because the person I was in July would have shrugged off that dispute, and the person I was in November went to war over it. Nothing about the situation changed between those few months. I did. When your identity is grounded entirely in a position, every slight to the position becomes a slight to you, and revenge starts dressing itself up as leadership.

But honestly? At the end of the day, none of it was that deep. It was one event, a couple of bruised egos, and a freshman/sophomore who could talk his way into (or out of) just about anything. All of us in FIJI figuring it out in real time, together. So all in all, I look back at this story and laugh. Because it was really funny. It was a chaotic, wtf kind of time, egos got a little too big (mine most of all), and we moved forward from it. I wouldn’t trade that time for anything.

-Colby