college, excel, and feelings.

As I write this, it is 10:13 on a Thursday night, the 23rd of August 2012. On Sunday, I moved in to my college dorm room and now I’m doing laundry for the first time.

My classes don’t start until Monday, but Orientation started today. My college has a program called Leadership, and I applied to and was accepted to it, so I had to move in early and attend a weeklong “retreat” (essentially) called EXCEL.

Let me just say that EXCEL was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever done in my life.

There were about sixty freshmen in my EXCEL group (called a Cohort; we’re Cohort 26) and about twenty to twenty-five leaders. We were broken up into ‘Small Groups’ with two to three leaders to a group, and throughout the week we interacted with our own small groups and with other small groups and were often broken up into different, temporary small groups. It was fantastic. Just fantastic.

I’ve never been around so many like-minded people with the same ideas and goals and priorities as me. I’ve never been around so many people who genuinely valued me for who I was and who appreciated the things I think and say. I’ve never been around so many people who immediately accepted me as I was, no matter what I wore or how I spoke or what I did and did not do. It was enlightening. It was encouraging.

It was EXCEL. I can’t think of any other words.

The first day I arrived, the leaders helped me unpack my stuff. They did this for everyone; a complete stranger carried my mini-fridge up four flights of stairs for me just because I joined an organization that they love. After we broke into our Small Groups I made fast, easy friends and then, when we interacted with other groups I made more fast, easy friends.

Day two we went to a place called Valley View Baptist Church to do a ropes course called Faith Walk. Our leaders and the facilitators challenged us to complete obstacles that we’d previously thought we couldn’t. I, personally, am terrified of both heights and climbing, but with the encouragement of my leaders and fellow Cohorts I found the courage to scale a twenty-foot pole (on a harness, of course) and walk across a single cable with only a rope on either side for handholds and balance.

About halfway across this ‘bridge’ (a term I’ll use very loosely, as it generally implies some sort of structure) I started to panic. I was shaking and terrified and all I could think was, “What the hell am I doing up here?!” I hesitated, and then I asked my facilitator to lower me down. Instead of doing so, he asked me, “Why don’t you just take one more step?”

In the time it took for me to take that one step, my leaders and Cohorts noticed that I was hesitating. They noticed that I was scared. And they encouraged me. They shouted my name, they whooped, they clapped. They told me I could do it, and I did. I made it all the way across the bridge and was lowered to the ground with an enormous smile on my face.

And that smile stayed in place for the rest of the week. On day three we did community service, and I, along with thirty or so of my Cohorts, cleaned up the Muskingum River. The day after that we played simulation games and acted through scenarios designed to teach us lessons about the world and to challenge the ways we think, feel, and perceive our environments.

We faced obstacles in these games and scenarios. We faced hardships. There were games that were intensely difficult, games that were filled with distractions and detractions, and even games that were designed to be impossible to win. We learned how to deal with unfairness, with injustice. We learned how to block out the things that don’t matter and focus on the things that do. We learned how to make the hardest of decisions and how to do so in a way that won’t leave a bitter taste in our mouths.

We learned how to accept defeat, and how to acknowledge that there are things even we, as leaders and scholars and driven individuals, cannot accomplish.

This workshop, seminar, retreat, whatever you want to call it has given me so much. It taught me to be comfortable in my own skin and to accept all of my quirks and my flaws. It taught me that you don’t have to be 100% sure of yourself to lead. It taught me that it’s okay to be scared and it’s okay to be nervous, but that it’s also okay to open up and dispel those fears, those nerves, because there are people in the world who will appreciate you for doing it.

If anyone from Cohort 26 ever reads this post, I want to tell you thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

For everyone else reading this post, I want to say I hope you find the happiness and the self-confidence and the peace of mind that I found this past week.