A few thoughts on my final season of ‪#‎TheChallenge‬. To my fellow challengers, please read.

Let me begin by saying that in no way do I regret ever participating in a reality series. I have been blessed with the opportunity to self-evaluate, compete, form relationships, travel and the list goes on and on. However, as my last adventure came onto air last night, I realized something that is extremely important for me to share with whoever is willing to understand. Just like anyone else, I have my reality TV favorites and the villains I despise, however, as a participant in a televised social experiment, I have come to realize that these characters are just that, characters. These one-dimensional portrayals of personality do not begin to elucidate the brilliance, truth and dynamicity of the person behind the personality. Now, this is not to say that everyone on your screen is at heart a great person with positive intention, however, stripped from the pressures of this public forum, the people you see, the Tweets you read, these are not the people that I have come to know at the core of their true selves, nor the representations that I will choose to remember as defining our relationship. Despite the level of confidence I have reached in my professional, academic and personal life, there is something to be said for the debilitating insecurity, hypersensitivity and defensiveness that is brought upon by participating in such an invasive and unrealistic setting, like #TheChallenge. My castmates and I, whether consciously or not, are forced into a position of constantly trying to prove ourselves to one another and to the unspoken audience in order to uphold a certain sense of character. We spend so much time defending our personhood, that we lose sense of our true personalities. We become hypersensitive to public and interpersonal criticisms and so much so that we become misconstrued representations of our own selves. So to my fellow ‪#‎Challengers‬, despite any relationship we may have had in the past, I want to wish you all well and successes. I hope that we can all come to shed the insecurities associated with this televised experiment, and come to realize that we have been incredibly fortunate to have gained such experience in our young lives. Please stop working so incredibly hard to defend this caricature of who you are, and recognize how truly unprecedented you are.