A friend recently sent me a letter about camp leadership and the expectations that come with it, and I think part of me has been grieving it ever since.

Not because it was new information. Not because it shocked me. But because it finally gave words to something I have carried quietly for years.

There is this unspoken thing at camp where people leave pieces of themselves behind long after they are gone. A certain laugh in the dining hall. A tradition they started. A way they made children feel safe. Some people become so deeply woven into camp that their absence never really feels like absence at all. They become stories people tell around campfires years later. Memories repeated so often they almost stop sounding human and start sounding holy.

And then someone new arrives.

Young. Nervous. Trying so hard.

And everyone expects them to somehow step perfectly into the shape of the person before them.

There’s something quietly cruel about being expected to carry a torch you were never taught how to hold.

At camp, leadership gets passed down like tradition. One person leaves, another steps in, and somehow everyone expects the next person to already know how to do it all. How to lead. How to comfort homesick kids. How to carry conflict gently. How to keep camp feeling magical while they themselves are exhausted. How to be dependable and cheerful and emotionally available every second of the day.

But confidence is not instinct. Leadership is not magic. And experience cannot be inherited through expectation alone.

Still, camp has this way of acting like it can.

And maybe the hardest part is that the comparisons rarely come from cruelty. Most of the time they come from love. Someone missing the people who raised them there. Someone remembering summers that meant everything to them. So they say things casually, never realizing how deeply those words land inside someone already struggling to feel enough.

“Well, so-and-so used to do it this way.”

“They were always really good at this.”

“Last year just felt different.”

And maybe they forget those people were once uncertain too.

Maybe they forget there was a time before they became “camp legends.” Before they knew how to lead chapel or calm a crying camper or hold everything together so naturally people thought they were born knowing how.

Because nobody remembers the becoming. Only the version that survived it.

And I think what broke a lot of us was trying to become whole beneath the weight of everyone else’s memories.

It was the feeling that no matter how much of ourselves we poured into camp, we were still standing in the shadow of people who had already become untouchable there. We gave everything we had to children and cabins and traditions while quietly wondering if anyone could tell we had no idea what we were doing.

I think about the versions of us sitting awake after lights out, emotionally hollowed out from giving all day long. Smiling until our cheeks hurt. Holding crying children while privately feeling like we were falling apart too. Listening to worship songs in chapels while wondering why we suddenly felt so unbearably alone in a place full of people.

Because camp asks people to give in ways that are hard to explain to anyone who has never lived it.

It asks for your patience. Your energy. Your softness. Your joy. Your ability to stay calm when children are crying and schedules are collapsing and your body is begging you to rest.

And the terrifying thing is that so many of us were willing to give it everything.

We loved camp enough to ignore our own exhaustion. Enough to keep showing up while our mental health got worse. Enough to convince ourselves that struggling meant we were weak instead of overwhelmed. Enough to believe that if we just gave more of ourselves away, maybe eventually we would finally feel worthy of being there.

I think there are people who have not returned to camp in years who still carry guilt every single summer when the season comes around. People who see photos online and feel their chest ache with homesickness for a version of themselves that no longer exists. People who miss camp so deeply it feels like grief, but also know going back would reopen wounds they barely survived the first time.

And that is such a confusing kind of heartbreak. To love something so much and still need distance from it. To miss a place while also recognizing it slowly consumed you. To realize the place that once made you feel most alive also taught you, quietly and over time, that your worth depended on how much of yourself you were willing to sacrifice for everyone else.

I do not think camp means to hurt people.

I think camp is made of beautiful, exhausted humans trying to recreate the magic they once survived themselves.

But sometimes that means the cycle repeats.

Young leaders arrive wanting desperately to belong, and before they have even figured out who they are, they are handed emotional responsibilities too heavy for their shoulders and expectations too large for their still-forming hearts. They learn quickly that the people who are loved most at camp are the ones who give the most. The ones who stay latest. Work hardest. Need least. Smile anyway.

And some of us did that until there was almost nothing left of ourselves outside of camp at all.

Not everyone who leaves camp stops loving it.

Some of us just finally realized we were disappearing there, and stepping away was the first time we chose to save ourselves instead of sacrificing ourselves for a place that taught us exhaustion was the same thing as devotion.