Summer Camp Secrets

Dear Summer Camp,

I don’t even know where to begin.

When I first drove through your gates on that hot summer’s day, and laid eyes on your fields, your trees, your buildings, I was nervous, but at the same time I remember feeling so excited to be a part of you, to get to know everything about you.

What’s followed has been the best 6 years of my life. You have become a home, a place where I am free and confident to be my essential self, a place where I live in the present, never really thinking about yesterday or tomorrow, just enjoying what’s happening in the here and now, always completely content.

You are the place where I made some of the best friends of my life, the people who ‘get’ me, my camp family who I know will be there for me always and stand by me whenever I need them.

You are the reason I am who I am, the reason I am calm in a crisis and am confident in finding solutions, not problems. I have learnt more from you than I can even explain – I have learnt to ask for help when I can’t do something alone, learnt how to be a leader, how to organise my own time and manage big workloads, how to plan an event for 300 people, how to entertain a large group of children during a thunderstorm, how to drive a truck with a trailer (and reverse it), how to ask myself what my options are whenever I’m not quite sure what to do… I could go on.

Each winter I count the days until I can return to you, and as the days get longer, that number gets smaller, and I get more excited for the moment my summer begins again. It’s like little butterflies are in the pit of my stomach all year, and as the sunnier months get closer, those butterflies flap faster and a swelling of happiness rises in my chest, because I know I’m going to be with you again soon.

You are the reason I know I can do this. ‘This’ being anything I want to do, anything I set my mind to.

You changed the course of my life. You have changed me. In the BEST way imaginable.

This isn’t just a summer fling anymore. We’re in a long term relationship. I’m committed. This is it. I’m in.

Are you?