On May 23, Max released “Bama Rush,” a documentary examining the world of sorority recruitment at the University of Alabama, highlighting the social and psychological pressures young women face. For Katie Plott, president of her Alabama sorority from 2014-2015, the film was a reminder of her tumultuous years as a student and a reminder of all the details that the documentary failed to capture.

In sorority recruitment, there was a tactic we saved for the top rushee—the girl you know is wanted by every house and it feels like you might die if she doesn’t rank you #1 on her list. As the other rushees are paraded out the door, the president stays behind with the top rushee while the members form a tunnel. Right when the doors are about to close, the president walks the Crown Jewel herself through the tunnel as the members scream her name like they’re at a rock concert and she’s the headliner. It’s so loud, you can hardly hear yourself think.

I used to think that was a good thing.

The noise surrounding the University of Alabama’s Greek system is overwhelming. It’s as though all the popular lunch tables in cafeterias across America assembled for a convention. If the Greek population at UA were a city, it would be bigger than Orange Beach, one of the state’s beloved beach towns.  Recruitment starts before Fall classes do, so by the time you show up for your first lecture, you already have five friends to sit with. The houses are behemoth luxuries, and thanks to the viral TikTok sensation of #bamarush, there’s more attention than ever on sorority row in Tuscaloosa. And after spending 18 years growing up five minutes away from campus, I couldn’t wait to be a part of it.

I loved everything about joining a sorority. I loved how the cool girls from bigger cities laughed at my jokes. I loved getting drunk off Mountain Dew and vodka (reader, I know) in a backyard off-campus while making out with an SAE who immediately forgot my name. I loved how, when you were hungover on Friday mornings, our chefs would fry anything left in our kitchen to oblivion and you’d crawl out of bed for the promise of hot wings and ranch dressing. I loved the risible code words we used during recruitment—”happier elsewhere” was the go-to comment to describe a girl you loathed, and “ornaments” were the doll-like members whose only purpose was to smile, wave and hypnotize rushees. I had 400 best friends and lived in a $12 million house. Was this real?

Every now and then, I would hear an alarming voice in the back of my head, but it was so easy to drown out. Girls would trade stories about being drugged like Pokémon cards. When a fraternity dressed in Civil War uniforms (and not the Union ones) interrupted our formal dinner to invite their dates to a party, the girls who received a rose were considered the lucky ones. Any experience that could otherwise make your skin crawl had been normalized to the point of invisibility. Anyway, who’s ready to party with Beta?

What might have been ominous to outsiders just felt like a tradition (a word eerily plastered all around campus) to me. I learned how to ride a bike on campus, and my marketing professor was my pastor at church. While everyone else was learning UA’s secrets, I was the one explaining them. I had explained the Machine, an institution I knew as early as middle school, to so many people that I had begun to sound like a 1950s car salesman.

Some believed the Machine to be an omnipotent force lingering around college, local and state politics, but I thought I saw it for what it really was: a group of rich college students with beer-bellies-in-training, the horniness of feral hogs, and a special feeling of being in on the joke, not completely unlike joining a sorority. Which is why, when my sorority’s Machine representative asked if I was interested in a student government position, I calmly sent her my resume and privately fist pumped in my dorm room. So long, sidelines! The coach had called me in! The Machine backed me for a student government senator position in 2013, and I won, with the extent of my campaigning being my sorority sisters changing their Facebook profile pictures to my election graphic.

I could say being Machine-adjacent was evil and conniving, but I’d be lying. It was just debaucherous parties and inside jokes with other Machine-backed senators. It was easy to forget this was politics, no matter how small, because it often felt like a game we were addicted to winning and no one was watching. We thought the independent senators were so annoying—always talking about taking us down and painting us as oil barons with curly mustaches and monocles. We would veto their bills out of spite and then get a keg.

Near the end of my term, an ex-Machine member proposed a resolution encouraging the Greek system to diversify its membership after sororities were forced to integrate in 2013. A resolution is the political equivalent of a tweet, so this seemed like an easy vote to anyone unfamiliar with UA politics. For the Machine, it was a “f— you” in Times New Roman font from a former member, and that was the only fuel we needed. We killed the measure, 27-5.

After the meeting, a small online publication published an article featuring a quote of mine as I defended the stance the Machine, my friends, had instructed me to take. I read it and wanted to dive headfirst into a tub of battery acid. Right then, the alarming voice I had put to rest came back with a roaring fever pitch, and I could see the situation for what it was: college kids playing God, if God were a little bitch. It was suddenly so obvious to me that this sort of petty, ignorant behavior was the same that colored our state capital with endless corruption charges and backwards laws, and the same bully behavior found in middle school cafeterias  I closed the article, buried my complicity six feet under, and did not seek re-election.

I wanted to go back to that second day of college, to the tunnel of screaming girls. I wanted to feel embraced and accepted. I wanted to drown in the noise instead of facing the music. I redirected my focus back to my sorority and became president, where the noise in the forms of recruitment and movie nights and swaps returned full force. This time, though, I was struggling. I had just been prescribed anxiety medication after telling my doctor that my mind couldn’t turn off at night. Really, I was in a deep depression, but at the time, I thought depression only happened to people who lost their entire family in a fire or kidnapping victims freed after 20 years of captivity, not an overworked sorority president desperate for success, approval and awards.

Then, on Bid Day, a member of my sorority posted a Snapchat with a caption using a racial slur.

The noise of sorority life did a great job of masking racism. When sororities were exposed for dropping a potential new member over the color of skin just one year prior, then-President Judy Bonner reopened recruitment to all women. The change itself was a unicorn band-aid over a bullet hole, but it made everyone feel good.   Though our house was next door to a historically black sorority, we hardly ever interacted with them. Ignorance was bliss. When a non-Greek student called one of my sisters racist, she responded, in complete seriousness, with enough saccharine to rival a peach, “I’m not a racist. I’m a Christian.”Even as someone who grew up in Tuscaloosa, where the KKK was once headquartered, I naively believed the black and white pictures I had seen in history textbooks were representative of a long time ago. Things are different now, my parents would say. But were they?

That night, I spoke on the phone with my sorority’s national representative, who had placed us on probation, to figure out a game plan. She ended the call by saying, with utter sincereness, “You really need to fix the racism problem.” As if racism were a leak in the faucet, and not a generational, systemic ticking time bomb. But I said “Yes, ma’am, of course,” and got to work.

First, I had a lot of work to do on myself, as a 20-year-old woman who had more privilege in my left pinky toe than most of the world, and had just voted against a diversity pledge without even thinking twice about it. But also, I was expected to teach 350 white women how to do the same thing…on my own. No one in the university administration actually wanted to address the problem that was, at-minimum, plaguing the entire Greek system, not just our sorority. At best, they expected the clearly misguided students to be teachers.

While Google was more helpful than the University administration and Greek Affairs office combined, I found solace outside the Greek system, where I could listen to different, progressive voices my own chapter lacked. It’s easier to deny a problem than it is to accept that you’ve been in the wrong, albeit unintentionally. But when you finally take responsibility, you’ll never look at anything the same ever again, and when I did, I felt sick. And then, I got mad.

I was mad at myself for how long it had taken me to get here, and even more mad that my revelation wasn’t clicking with other people. My finance homework was often shelved until five minutes before class, playing second fiddle to me constantly explaining that no, you can’t say the word your favorite rappers say, ever, period, even in private, you shouldn’t say that word, okay? Can you say okay? Good! There were critically acclaimed speakers, passionate discussions, and a lot of white women tears, but I was hopeful that while the rest of Greek life remained in its own bubble, our sorority could be the leader of much-delayed, radical, and necessary change.

Seven months passed. We couldn’t have parties or social events, a condition of probation that had even helicopter parents calling my cell phone to complain, so we focused on team building, world understanding, and we’re-already-here-so-why-not alcohol education courses. One March night before spring break, I received an update from our sorority’s national headquarters. I announced to the chapter that night we were finally off probation. A member took a celebratory Snapchat captioned with the same racial slur that had gotten us on probation in the first place.

I was no longer hopeful.

But not exactly hopeless. How could I be? The first items I packed to move four miles away from my parents’ house to my freshman dorm room were my Bill O’Reilly books. By the time I finished school, I became the liberal monster my parents always feared. Change is constant and possible, even if it’s not seen immediately. At the end of my presidential term, I passed down three items to my successor: a parking spot right behind the house, the Binder That Has All The Answers and possibility.

The pit that had taken up an artist’s residency in my stomach for the past three years reared its ugly head at graduation. As I sat in Coleman Coliseum waiting for my name to be called, the alarming voice whispered again in the back of my mind. After ignoring it for so long, I finally decided to listen. I dropped out of law school a month before it started and moved west to California with no job, apartment or plan.

The further I got from Alabama, the quieter everything became. Behind me stood the regret of my own actions—from benefitting from a system that favored racism and toxicity, to voting against a resolution out of malice instead of values, to not questioning the whiteness of Greek life before it became national news. In front of me wasn’t much better—the anger and disappointment that comes from realizing your time is up and it’s too late to change your answer. The anger lives in my body still, as I wonder why the administration doesn’t do anything about the Machine and its questionable practices, and why “fixing” a systemic issue fell into the hands of an unqualified, depressed 20 year old. I wonder if, when watching the Bama Rush documentary on Max, prospective students will be attracted to the noise like I was without seeing what’s underneath.

As I started my new life in Los Angeles, there was no screaming tunnel of girls yelling my name, but I didn’t need that anymore. I could finally hear myself think.

Katie Plott is a writer and comedian based in Los Angeles, and a Tuscaloosa native. She attended the University of Alabama from 2012-2016.