Our new A Calendar to Live By 2018 will be unveiled at the Pink Carpet Gala on September 9, and we’re so excited that the big day is almost here! We’re offering you a brief introduction to the 2018 calendar girls team here on our blog – we asked them to share a story about one of their life-shaping moments and we’ll post the responses here over the next few weeks. We hope you’ll come meet these women at the Gala! Click HERE for a link if you’d like to learn more or get tickets!
When I was in college, I went through Rush, however, I did not get selected by a sorority. Surprisingly, looking back, I am glad that no one picked me. Because, later that semester, the school’s administration decided that the female students had more interest in belonging to a sorority than the current four could handle. They decided to ask another sorority to found a chapter on our campus, which I joined. We were a small but mighty group of women who bonded immediately and created memories and traditions that the chapter still continues. During the remaining years at school, those women became my closest friends and many still are today.
Fast forward 20+ years to homecoming in the fall of 2016. I had been diagnosed the previous July and was up at homecoming with my family. Unbeknownst to me, my husband and friends had contacted the current chapter of women at my school and had created a “Titan Strong” (Titan is our mascot) t-shirt for everyone to wear in support of me. I came around the corner to the Chapter Room and there stood 41 college students with the t-shirt on. Now, these women didn’t know me, I didn’t know them, but because we are sisters, they did everything they could to support me. They wrote letters of encouragement to me, my husband and my children. One of them had #katystrong buttons made and another’s mom knitted me a prayer shawl. There were a lot of tears shed that day, but they were happy tears because of the love that I felt from each one of these women.
What I have come to realize from 20+ years ago is that sisterhood has no boundaries. Distance, age, generation or background does not define who a sister can be. I have been welcomed as a sister throughout my life into organizations I never believed would have such an impact on my life. We had an expression in my sorority that has stayed with me throughout my life, “Love in our bond." To me this is sisterhood defined and has been a guiding principle of my life for the last 20+ years.
-Katy Loy