The sky was still black and I could barely walk after the three hour long competition across campus the day before. One hundred of my closest friends were all sitting on the stone wall, chattering in sleepy voices about the closing ceremony to come, and attempting to articulate EXACTLY how much they didn’t want to go home. Not today.

I sat with Peter and Amber, silently watching the others as we tried to think of something uplifting to say. The sky started turning pink as the sun came over the mountains to illuminate the enormous lake that fifteen people would race across in less than an hour before we were forced to sit through the most painful chapel of the week. The last one; where we would meet up with the other two hundred members of our new family that were too weary to make it to the sunrise at Slim Point.

And I had never felt so happy in my entire life.

High school is no dream. For most people, it’s the worst four years of their existence. But I was lucky enough to be able to have a group outside of school that seemed to be an alternate universe.

This universe was found at the local YMCA and it was called Leaders.

My journey with Leaders began when my brother got into high school. My mom heard about leaders and decided to get him involved. When she went to pick him up after the meeting, she expected him to be angry for forcing him to go; but all he could do was rave about the kids, the program, and the adviser. She dropped off a quiet, shy kid; but Danny graduated high school and the program as a responsible, considerate well-rounded man. When he talked about Leaders and how amazing it was; I never quite understood it. When I got into sixth grade, I heard about the Jr. Leaders program and that it was for middle school kids. I attended the meetings, and after a few weeks, made lifelong friends and I finally understood why Danny never missed one single meeting.

On the surface, Leaders is a group of teenagers from middle and high school who go into a room at the local YMCA and talk about community service events; they then go to these events and help out. But with that assumption, it’s not even three percent of the iceberg of what Leaders really is.

When I walk into a meeting, I am warmly greeted by people that I know love and care about me as I do them. I know at Leaders I can be myself and have no fear of being judged. My group at my YMCA is incredible, but it doesn’t stop there; every fall, winter, and spring, Leaders groups across the northeast hold a ‘Leader’s Rally’.

A rally is a weekend long team-building retreat with well over two hundred teens from all over New England and even parts of New York attending. At a rally, you are placed into one of around twenty ‘Living groups’. The Living groups are separated by how many years and how many rallies you’ve been to. I have formed strong bonds and foundations with these people. I miss each and every one of them and I still think of the people I met there often. Beyond rally, they have ‘Leader’s School’ during the summer which is a week long rally.

My first Leaders School experience is one that is simply impossible to forget. For the first year students at Leader’s school, we hold an initiation ceremony. This tradition is a little different every year. For my first year, we walked down a pathway to a beautiful site called Slim Point on campus. On the way, there were cardboard signs up saying words such as, wonder-striking, perfect, eye-opening, inspiring, and (of course) unforgettable. My peers and I realized that these words were not only exact representations of what Leader’s school was, but that they were words that we had used to express what Leader’s School was to us just the day before. At the end of the trail, all the other leaders and advisors were there waiting for us. We were officially being welcomed into a part of Leaders that we hadn’t reached before. We were a more embedded part of the Leader’s family and during that ceremony I knew: I had learned things that I needed to carry out through my entire life.

Upon entering my seventh and final year of Leaders, I knew that I had gotten out what I had put into this club, which is everything. When I joined Leaders, I expected a fun club full of people that I would count as my friends, but I never expected to find pieces of my family I never would have met otherwise.

I never expected to find myself.

I broadened my horizons, though I know that I’ll never stop growing as a person or as a leader.

I can’t thank my fellow leaders enough; nor can I ever repay them for what they have done for me. The price tag is my life and I only hope that I can use that life to give back to the world and create love where there was once hatred, peace where there was one destruction, and joy where there was once sorrow.

When I wanted to quit, when I thought life was too much, when I wanted to leave it all behind; they brought me back up and healed my scars with words of love and the promise of an everlasting bond. They never failed to remind me who I was and make me feel like I was on top of the world. They told me I was worth every bit of trouble I ever gave them and then some.

Even though I miss this important part of my life that came to an end, I carry on with my life knowing what I have learned from this experience. I have transferred the commitment I have for Leaders into another important piece of my life; college and the career that will follow.

I know that, because of Leaders, life lessons won’t be learned by sitting back and watching life go by without you. We all have a choice: to live or to exist, and you can’t let the little things get to you. Everything I have gotten out of Leaders, I take with me and not only live by them, but share what I have with my peers and hope that they can carry on with them as their own wisdom. I hope what I can share from Leader’s carries on endlessly to enrich other people with even a little taste of what Leaders was to me. I hope the real meaning of family, unity, and love carries through to as many people as it can.

It’s kind of like igniting a flame and passing on the torch. Like the theme of my very first Leaders School experience stated: “Tag! You’re it!”