The Choice

what’s actually real instead of a reality created by your fear. Finally, he
agreed to the assignment. And to his surprise, four of the most popular
girls accepted! He’d already made up his mind about his worth, he’d
already rejected himself ĕve hundred times in his own head, and that
fear had been coming through in his body language—in eyes that were
hooded and averted instead of sparkling, connecting. He had made
himself unavailable for joy. Once he embraced his fear and his choices
and took a risk, he discovered possibilities that he hadn’t known
existed.
A few years later, on an autumn day in 2007, Carlos called me from
his college dorm room. Anxiety pinched his voice. “I need help,” he
said. Now he was a sophomore at a Big Ten university in the Midwest.
When I heard from him out of the blue, I thought that perhaps his
social anxieties had again become overwhelming.
“Tell me what’s happening,” I said.
It was pledge week on campus, he said. I already knew that it had
been his dream since he was in high school to belong to a fraternity.
Once he began college, the dream had become even more important
to him, he told me. Greek life was a signiĕcant piece of his university’s
social fabric, and all of his friends were pledging, so being in a frat
seemed necessary to his social survival. He had heard rumors about
inappropriate hazing rituals at other fraternities, but he had chosen his
fraternity carefully. He liked the racial diversity of the members and
the fraternity’s emphasis on social service. It seemed like a perfect ĕt.
While many of his friends were anxious about the hazing process,
Carlos wasn’t worried about it. He believed that hazing had a purpose,
that it helped the young men to bond more quickly, as long as it wasn’t
over the top.
But pledge week was not turning out as Carlos had imagined.
“What’s different?” I asked.
“My pledge master’s on a power trip.” He told me that the pledge