A few days ago, I had a moment that caught me completely off guard.

I was sitting at my focus chapter’s program, helping the girls learn their dance for our Spring Convention talent show. The speakers were blasting Starships by Nicki Minaj while they tried to piece together the choreography, dissolving into laughter every time someone forgot a move. Every thirty seconds someone would yell “wait wait wait start over,” and suddenly we’d all be jumping around the room again, screaming the lyrics like the entire region was watching us and we weren’t in the rec room of the JCC.

Afterwards, I taught them some cheers and chants they’d need for spirit circles at convention. We tried to get through “Honor and Courage,” but every time the notoriously difficult hand motions came up, the girls would burst out laughing halfway through.

And somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, it hit me. Soon enough, none of this will belong to me anymore.

For most of my time in BBYO, I’ve been moving forward too quickly to think about that. There was always another election coming up, another convention on the calendar, another idea I wanted to bring to the table. The pace of it all makes you feel like you’re inside something permanent, until you’re not.

Serving as Regional N’siah this year has been one of the most meaningful parts of my journey. It’s one thing to love this movement from inside your own chapter, but it’s another to step into rooms across your region and realize how many different girls are experiencing BBYO in their own way. I’ve had the chance to sit with teens one on one, hear their ideas, help them navigate challenges in their chapters, and watch their confidence grow in real time. Those conversations have shaped me just as much as any leadership training ever could. Being able to impact girls in such a hands on way while constantly meeting new people and building connections across the region pushed me to grow as a leader and as a person. It forced me to listen more carefully, think more thoughtfully, and understand what real change in a community actually looks like. Serving as Regional N’siah hasn’t just been a title for me; it’s been a privilege to help shape a place that shaped me first.

This past month carried a strange mix of emotions. I had the honor of fulfilling a long time dream of mine: running for International N’siah. It was one of those goals you almost feel silly saying out loud because it means so much to you. I spent months preparing my materials, imagining what it would mean to serve the movement on that level—praying for another year inside this world that had become such a constant in my life. I daydreamed about traveling the world, meeting BBGs across the order, forming new friendships, and pushing others to be their best selves the same way so many people had pushed me.

When that election ended and my name wasn’t called, I didn’t know how I could possibly move forward. Anyone who has worked that hard toward something without achieving it understands that feeling. But the part that stayed with me longer was something else, for the first time since I joined BBYO, there wasn’t another “next step” waiting.

Instead, I had to sit (for nine hours in that election room) with the realization that my time here, this weird, chaotic, beautiful world of conventions and late night conversations and spontaneous post programming dinners, was actually finite. That thought kept bringing me back to the beginning.

It brought me back to eighth grade, when me and five of my friends stood outside the tiny gazebo at a local park wearing our matching Urban Outfitters tanks, Lululemon leggings, and platform Converse, convinced we were WAY too cool to be at something our friend’s older sister had been begging us to attend for weeks. The program that night was making playlists, which felt like a ridiculous reason to leave the comfort of my bed and sit in a humid park surrounded by gnats.

But afterward, we piled into an older girl’s car and gripped the handlebars as she booked it to Chipotle as if she was competing in a drag race with the Alephs of our brother chapter. I remember laughing the whole way there, feeling oddly proud that these high school girls treated us like we belonged with them. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was the night something shifted for me. September 8th, 2021.

BBYO has always been made up of moments like that. Not the big, polished ones you write speeches about, just small things that slowly become part of who you are. Like the people who notice when you’re standing alone with your plate at a summer program and wave you over to their table, like the Jewish educators who sit with you during chofesh at International Kallah while you question everything you thought you knew about Judaism and somehow leave you feeling more connected than when you arrived, like the quiet pride that comes from giving a speech you were terrified to deliver and realizing your voice actually carries in a room.

Those moments are easy to overlook while they’re happening, they feel ordinary at the time. They only start to glow a little brighter when you realize there won’t be an endless supply of them.

For a long time, I thought the most important thing in BBYO was making the most of every opportunity—running for positions, going to conventions, pushing myself to do more. And those things mattered, of course. They shaped me in ways I’m incredibly grateful for, but lately I’ve been thinking about something else.

What stays with you isn’t the titles or the results of elections. It’s the people who made you feel like you belonged when you weren’t sure you did. It’s the older girl who takes a few minutes to talk to the new MIT sitting quietly in the corner, it’s the staff member who drags you out of a room when you’ve just lost an election and reminds you that your entire worth doesn’t live inside this bubble, it’s the moment you realize the spark that brought you here is still there, even after everything that happened along the way.

My path in BBYO has never been particularly straight. I left for a while. I came back. I won things I didn’t expect to win and lost things that meant the world to me. I’ve questioned whether I belonged more times than I can count. And yet somehow, this movement kept finding ways to pull me back in.

Now that my time here is starting to wind down, I’ve been thinking a lot about how strange that is. BBYO gives you this intense, fleeting window where everything feels big and important and deeply personal. Then one day, you blink, and you’re the senior standing at the edge of it. There’s a quiet sadness in that realization, but there’s also something really beautiful about it. Because the fact that it ends is what makes it matter so much in the first place, and when I eventually walk away from this chapter of my life, I know I won’t be leaving empty handed.

This movement has given me so much, and it will live with me far beyond my time here. It’ll live with me in the way I instinctively look for the person standing alone in a room. It’ll live with me in the way I believe my voice belongs in spaces that once terrified me. It’ll live with me in the friendships that somehow took strangers to people who know the most vulnerable parts of me.

Sure, I’ll be leaving the spirit circles, the weekly programs, the elections, the speeches, and the chaos of convention weekends. But I won’t leave the person this community helped me become. I write this article teary eyed, it’s March 16th, 2025— it’s been 1,650 days since that first program. That’s the funny thing about BBYO. You don’t notice your time passing as you’re living it. 

But one day, you wake up and realize it’s over. 

Suddenly every cheer sounds a little louder, every laugh lasts a little longer, and every moment feels just a little more sacred, because you finally understand something you were too busy living to see before: this was never meant to last forever, it was meant to help you grow into the person you’re meant to be. The art of leaving something you love is complex— but alas, all good things must come to an end.