accident prone

Listening to This American Life’s camp episode last week, originally aired 12 years ago, I started thinking back to my own child hood camp experiences. From the time I turned 11 or so I started going to at least one week long camp every summer. I’m pretty sure my mother used the one or two weeks I was gone during the summer as a personal vacation from motherhood, and with a son like me who could blame her?

Camp was a personal escape from me too. As a kid I never felt like I belonged, while friends seemed to always be easy enough to make I always felt like an outsider. For some reason those week long immersions in to a new social dynamic felt refreshing and allowed me to not worry about fitting in or being liked. Maybe it was the length of the camps that didn’t allow the complex groups to form that left me feeling so alienated at home, but whatever it was I felt like camp allowed me the freedom to be a different me. Not that I lied about who I really was, or became someone different, but that being able to let go of my insecurities and my doubts about being worthy of friendship and just be a kid.

Whether it was YMCA Camp in Boone or church camp in Guthrie Center with my friend Brad, or, in high school, Track Camp at ISU I always went away feeling that at camp I would be the kid that everyone wanted to be friends with. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, while I still keep in contact with friends from high school I never made lasting friendships at camp. Maybe that says something about how real friendships are grounded in the sometimes hard real world, not in the fantasy of a week long vacation from oneself.

Did you ever go to camp? Were your experiences similar to mine or drastically different? I’d love to hear about your thoughts.