Whether you’re a freshman or not, having someone ask you if you are one is typically not well-received. So why do eager-looking students clad in black fleece vests keep asking you that very question outside Leo’s or in Red Square? As a current ESCAPE leader, I’ll admit we are aggressive, but I’m continuously reminded that there’s good reason for it.
At Georgetown, students create an unconscious hierarchy for everything from intelligence and athletic ability to attractiveness and beirut proficiency. In this competitive environment, I sometimes find it easy to slip into a cocoon of self-consciousness. As I compare myself to the seemingly perfect student body roaming the campus, it sets in, leaving me tentative to try things I wouldn’t normally do or be seen doing, or wary of people with whom I don’t think I’d connect.
In times like this I stay in my conservative comfort zone, or at least the closest thing to one, amidst abundant anxieties. Whenever I spend a lot of continuous time in one place, I tend to drift into a state of routine staleness, and overanalysis—a strange phenomenon that leaves me at my worst.
I’d like to think that I’m not the only person this happens to, especially in the throes of freshman year, a time characteristically marked by questioning, bewilderment and disconnect. Many people fell in love with Georgetown at first sight, but frankly, I didn’t.
The strange bubble I described developed pretty quickly, and at the time I didn’t even notice the walls I was constructing. I deprived myself of anything I deemed outside of them, and remained oversensitive to the way I presented myself.
This is admittedly sounding a bit dramatic, but in all seriousness, it’s true. I really was inwardly closing myself up, and forgetting what it was to be fearless and know what I wanted.
ESCAPE is a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but for me it was a much-needed reminder of what really matters, and a bitch-slap in the face telling me not to waste my time being insecure.
My experience started with a mass of confident-looking freshmen bearing pillows and sleeping bags, all seeming to know someone. Actually, I won’t lie, I did too—two of my friends unexpectedly turned up there with me, much to my great relief. Nevertheless, I was still tense, lost in a sea of faces I mostly didn’t know, many of whom seemed to be staring at the yellow bus and wondering what they’d gotten themselves into.
Getting under that layer of cynicism and assumptions is a daunting task, but I’m consistently taken aback by ESCAPE’s ability to do it. How? Is there some magical, cult-like secret that ESCAPE won’t reveal until you’re trapped in its clutches for 27 hours in Shepherd’s Spring, Maryland? (Insert dramatic clip of Beethoven’s 5th.)
Well, frankly, what it did was force me to sit in a room with five people I didn’t know for an hour. The level of intimacy reached in my small discussion group allowed me to let worries and burdens and personal stories loose, reassured by the realization that we all, as different as we were, shared many of the same common experiences as first-year students at Georgetown. Not everyone wanted to get personal, and not everyone had a story to tell, but the open environment that evolved was an experience I consider unique in my time here.
In the world of Georgetown, with pressures coming at me from all sides, it’s hard to be vulnerable, and it’s refreshing to find release. I can find it at a concert, in going for a good run—but, strange as it may sound, never in as profound and influential a way as in being myself in front of equally trusting and vulnerable strangers.
As a sophomore, I’m incredibly thankful that a year ago I decided to take a chance on ESCAPE. Putting myself out there was a challenge, but a rewarding one—one that I hope new students will be open-minded and brave enough to take on while they still can.
I still occasionally get stuck in the rut of overcritical self-analysis, or subconsciously decide based on appearances whether someone will like me (or vice versa), but remembering ESCAPE (and going on more ESCAPEs, since I’ve had the privilege of being a leader this year) is one of the ways I bring myself back into my senses, a realm I can gladly say I’ve spent more time in since.
