There is a word I keep reaching for when I try to describe what camp does to me, and I cannot find it. Happy is too clean. Grateful is too polished. Healing is too linear. What I actually feel is something that lives in the cracks between all of those words, something that does not fit on a greeting card or in a two-sentence Instagram caption.
Complicated happy. That is the closest I can get.
Because here is the thing nobody tells you about joy when you live with depression: joy does not cancel depression out. It does not show up like a health pack in a video game and top your meter back to full. It shows up alongside the depression, sometimes in the same moment, and you are standing there holding both of them like two things that should not fit in the same hand but somehow do. You are laughing and you are exhausted. You are present and you are grieving. You are exactly where you want to be and you are also, quietly, somewhere far away inside yourself.
Camp is where I learn to hold all of that at once and not drop it.
Every Year I Wonder If I Should Go Back
I am going to be honest with you because that is what this blog is for. Every single year, as summer gets closer, there is a version of me that starts building a case against going back to camp. She is very convincing, this version. She pulls up all the evidence. The fatigue that does not respond to sleep the way it used to. The sensory load of a camp environment, which is not small if you are autistic and running on a nervous system that has opinions about noise and crowds and schedule changes. The loneliness that can live inside community, which is its own particular cruelty. The grief that does not go on vacation just because you did.
She makes a solid argument. I will give her that.
And then I go anyway.
Not because I have heroically defeated the doubt. Not because I prayed it away or talked myself into some sparkling certainty. I go because something in me, something that sits deeper than the anxiety and the fatigue, just knows. It has been right enough times that I have learned to trust it even when the rest of me is voting no.
Faith is part of that, if I am being completely transparent. I do not think I always know what is good for me. I think sometimes the thing I need is exactly the thing I am most tempted to avoid. Proverbs 3:5-6 gets quoted a lot and sometimes it gets quoted to death, but it is still true. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. I have leaned on my own understanding enough times to know its limits. My understanding would have kept me home more than once. My understanding would have cost me so much.
So I pack the bag and I go.
What Camp Actually Feels Like When You Are Running on Empty
I want to be careful here because I am not going to glamorize it. I am not going to write the version where I arrive and the music swells and the sun hits the water just right and suddenly everything is fine. Sometimes that moment happens. But even when it does, it is one moment inside a much longer, more complicated experience.
Camp when you are chronically fatigued is a logistical negotiation that runs constantly in the background. You are calculating. How much energy did I spend this morning. What do I need to do this afternoon. Can I find ten minutes of quiet somewhere without disappearing on the people who need me. Am I pushing too hard or am I using my health as an excuse to pull back when connection is what I need most. That last question is genuinely hard to answer and I do not always get it right.
Camp when your nervous system is on its own program is a sensory negotiation that also runs constantly. Certain sounds. Certain lights. The kind of busy that has a specific texture when fifty things are happening at once and all of them want a piece of your attention. I have gotten better at managing this. I have also gotten better at being honest about it instead of just pushing through until I crash somewhere inconvenient. Progress is not the same as solved. I will take progress.
Camp when depression is in the passenger seat means you can be surrounded by people who genuinely care about you and still feel, in some quiet corner of yourself, alone. I think people who have not experienced depression sometimes struggle to understand this. They see you laughing. They see you engaged and useful and contributing. They do not see the thing happening underneath, the low hum that does not turn off, the effort it takes to remain present, the way you have to sometimes consciously choose to stay in the room with your own life.
But here is what I know from enough summers: the laughing is still real. The engagement is still real. The low hum does not cancel those things out. They exist at the same time, and somehow the real stuff is worth showing up for even when the hum is loud.
And Then There Are the Kids
Okay. Here is where the complicated happy starts to tip in a direction I can actually name.
I love mentoring young people. I have loved it for as long as I can remember. There is something that happens when you are sitting with a young person, just genuinely present with them, not performing or advising or trying to fix them, just with them, that I cannot describe as anything other than sacred. I mean that word sincerely and without embellishment. It feels like being allowed into something holy.
Kids at camp are in this in-between space. They are away from home. Away from whatever the school year did to them. Away from the version of themselves they have to perform for their regular life. Camp has this weird permission structure where it is somehow okay to be a little more yourself than usual, a little more honest, a little more willing to try something embarrassing in front of other people. That permission structure is fragile and it is worth protecting, which is part of why I am not going to share specific stories or moments here. Those belong to the kids they happened to. They are not mine to spread around the internet.
What I can say is that every summer, something happens, probably several somethings, where I get to see a young person land inside themselves a little more solidly than they arrived. Not because of anything dramatic I did. The mentor is not the hero of anyone else’s story, and I am deeply skeptical of the version of this work where the adult gets to center themselves in what is supposed to be the kid’s experience. But I get to be present for those moments. I get to be a small, consistent, non-dramatic piece of an environment where growing is possible.
That matters to me in a way that goes bone-deep.
I think it is because I remember being a young person who needed to be seen. Who needed an adult to look at them and not flinch, not manage them from a distance, not project a version of them that was more comfortable. Just look and see what was actually there. I did not always have that. When I did have it, it changed things. I know what that is worth because I know what it costs not to have it.
So when I get to be that person for someone else, even in a small way, even in a way they might not remember in twenty years, I feel something that I can only call purpose. And purpose, it turns out, does not need conditions to be meaningful. It does not wait until you are rested or sorted or no longer carrying the weight of your own hard stuff. It shows up in the middle of all of it and says this counts.
It counts.
The Belonging Problem
I want to talk about something that I think gets underexamined in the narrative around community and belonging, which is that belonging is not always comfortable and it is not always continuous.
Camp gives me belonging. That is genuinely true. There is something about returning to the same place with overlapping groups of people, about having history with a community, about being known in the shorthand way that only comes from time, that provides something my everyday life does not always have. When I walk into that space, there is a part of me that exhales in a way I did not know I was holding.
And also. Belonging can be lonely. Being part of something can feel, some days, like watching it from just slightly outside the glass. Like everyone else found the frequency and you are almost on it, almost, but there is a hum of static that does not fully clear. I do not know how universal that feeling is. I suspect it is more common than people say because saying it out loud feels like ingratitude, and nobody wants to seem ungrateful for community when community is what everyone is supposed to want.
I am saying it because I think the incomplete version of belonging is still worth having. The glass-edge feeling does not mean the belonging is fake. It might just mean you are autistic and human and carrying things and sometimes all of those together create a little static. You are still in the room. You are still real to the people in it. The static is yours, not evidence that you do not belong.
I am still learning to believe that last sentence. Some summers I am better at it than others.
What Camp Does Not Fix
Camp does not fix my health. Camp does not fix my depression or resolve my fatigue or tidy up the grief I carry or answer the questions about the future that I do not have answers to yet. I come home from camp and those things are still there, waiting in the hallway with their coats on like they never left. Because they did not leave. They do not work that way.
Camp does not fix loneliness, not completely. You can leave a community experience feeling more alone than when you arrived, and I have had that happen, and it is its own particular sucker punch when it does. You geared up for connection and connection was real and then you drove home and the quiet of your own space felt louder than before. That is real. I am not going to pretend it does not happen.
Camp does not make me more neurotypical. The sensory stuff and the social processing stuff and the way my brain moves through a crowded, high-stimulus environment are not going to be different next summer. I will adapt. I have a decade of adaptations logged. But I will not be fixed, because I was not broken. I am just running different software on hardware that did not come with a manual, and camp environments were not designed with me as the primary user.
And yet.
And yet I go back. And yet it matters. And yet the complicated happy is real and worth it.
The Moments That Sneak Up On You
There is a specific kind of moment that happens at camp that I have started to recognize and guard like a small treasure. It happens when I am not looking for it, which is probably the point. It is the moment when something is funny and I laugh for real, not the social laugh, the real one that comes from somewhere unexpected and surprises me on the way out. It is the moment at the end of a long day when I sit down somewhere and realize I am, right now, exactly where I am supposed to be. Not in some cosmic pre-determined destiny way, just in the simple present-tense sense. Here. This. Enough.
Those moments do not require everything else to be good. They arrive in the middle of tired. They arrive in the middle of complicated. They arrive in the middle of the low hum. And when they do, they are not saying that everything is fine, they are saying that something is good, and something good, right now, is what we have.
I have learned to take that. To not require it to be more than it is. To not poke at it and ask why it cannot last longer or be bigger or come with fewer conditions. Just take the moment and say thank you.
Psalm 118:24. This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. Not the week. Not the season. The day. Sometimes just the hour. Sometimes just the moment on a log by the water at the end of a long one, when something small is genuinely, uncomplicated-ly good.
I am learning to rejoice in the hour. The moment on the log. The real laugh that surprised me.
That is not nothing. That is so much more than nothing.
Why I Keep Going Back
I go back because purpose does not wait for perfect conditions and neither should I. I go back because there are young people in that space who deserve consistent adults, and I can be consistent even when I am also complicated. I go back because somewhere in a camp environment, every single summer, something happens that I could not have predicted and could not have engineered, something small and true and lit up from the inside, and it is worth all the tired and all the static to be there when it does.
I go back because community, even imperfect community, even community that leaves me feeling a little outside the glass some days, is better than the alternative. I know the alternative. I have lived it. The glass-edge feeling is its own kind of belonging and I will take it over nothing.
I go back because I think this is part of what I am for. Not in a grandiose way. In a quiet, specific, deeply personal way. This is part of how I am wired and what I care about and what feels true when I am doing it, even when I am doing it while tired and somewhat falling apart at the seams. The falling apart at the seams does not disqualify me. Sometimes it might even be the thing that makes me useful, because young people can smell pretending from three miles out and a mentor who has clearly seen some things and is still here is a different kind of message than a mentor who has everything together.
I go back because the complicated happy is still happy. Because joy that sits beside pain is not lesser joy. Because belonging that has static in it is still belonging. Because purpose that shows up in the middle of grief and fatigue and depression is still purpose, is maybe even more purpose because it showed up anyway.
Because I am still here. Still showing up. Still going back.
And that matters. The young people matter. The real laughs matter. The moments on the log matter. The exhausted, complicated, faithful, lit-from-the-inside yes matters.
It all matters. Every complicated, imperfect, beautiful bit of it.
See you at camp.
