finding yourself

This is the first of several reflections on the eleven years I spent at camp, the people who shaped them, and what it means to leave a place that will always feel a little like home.
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I don’t think anyone prepares you for the grief that comes from leaving something you still love.

We’re taught to expect grief after death. After divorce. After losing a job or saying goodbye to someone we’ve known for years. Those losses make sense to people. They have names. They have rituals. They have casseroles and sympathy cards and conversations that begin with, “I’m so sorry.”

But what do you call the ache that comes from willingly walking away from a place that shaped you?

What do you call the kind of grief that comes from making the right decision, while wishing with every part of you that it hadn’t been necessary?

I’ve asked myself those questions more times than I can count over the past few months.

When people hear that I left camp, the response is usually simple.

“Well… you chose to leave.”

They’re right.

I did.

But I wish people understood that choosing something doesn’t make it painless.

Sometimes the deepest grief is born from the decisions we make with clear eyes. Decisions that aren’t made because love disappeared, but because somewhere along the way, you realized that love alone couldn’t carry what had become too heavy.

I spent eleven years at camp.

Eleven years is long enough for a place to stop feeling like a destination and start feeling like part of your identity.

It became woven into the rhythm of my life so quietly that I never noticed it happening. Summers were measured by staff week and closing day. My calendar bent around retreats and work weekends. I could drive those mountain roads without thinking because my hands had learned every curve before my mind ever had.

Home stopped being an address.

Sometimes it was a gravel road disappearing into the Blue Ridge Mountains.

People ask what I miss, and I never know how to answer.

I could tell them I miss the mountains, and that would be true.

I could tell them I miss hearing laughter echo across camp after the sun went down, or watching the valley disappear beneath morning fog, or the familiar sound of screen doors slamming all summer long.

That would all be true too.

But those aren’t the things that wake me up missing camp.

What I miss is harder to explain.

I miss the certainty.

I miss belonging somewhere so completely that I never questioned whether there was a place for me there.

I miss believing that there would always be another summer.

There is something quietly heartbreaking about discovering that a chapter of your life has ended before your heart has caught up to it.

Your mind knows you’ve left.

Your feet know you don’t drive that road anymore.

But your heart still keeps reaching for something that no longer belongs to your present.

People don’t always understand that kind of grief.

Maybe because the place is still there.

Camp didn’t disappear.

The cabins are still standing.

The campfires are still being lit.

Someone else is making memories in the spaces where mine were made.

Life continued exactly as it was supposed to.

It just continued without me.

I think that’s what has made this loss feel so isolating.

When someone dies, everyone grieves together.

When you leave a place, the world rarely notices.

It doesn’t pause.

It doesn’t ask how you’re doing months later.

It simply expects you to find something else and keep moving.

Maybe I will.

Maybe, someday, another place will feel like home.

But I don’t think that diminishes what camp was.

For eleven years, it held versions of me that no longer exist.

The eager twenty-something who thought she had forever.

The exhausted staff member who ran on coffee and purpose.

The woman who celebrated victories, carried disappointments, cried in quiet places where no one could see, laughed until she couldn’t breathe, and kept showing up because she believed the work mattered.

Those versions of me are still there somehow.

Scattered across those mountains like forgotten wildflowers.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s why leaving hurt so much.

It wasn’t because I was walking away from a place.

It was because I was saying goodbye to every version of myself that had been loved, stretched, broken, healed, and changed there.

People say you can’t go back.

They’re right.

Even if I drove through those gates tomorrow, I couldn’t return to the camp I’m grieving.

Because the place I’m missing isn’t only made of cabins and trails.

It’s made of moments.

Of people.

Of seasons.

Of a younger version of myself who had no idea that one day she’d have to learn how to love a place from a distance.

Maybe that’s what grief really asks of us.

Not to forget.

Not to move on.

But to carry what was beautiful without asking it to become what it used to be.

I’m still learning how to do that.

Some days I do it well.

Other days, I still find myself looking toward the mountains, missing a place that gave me eleven years… and wondering if somewhere, in ways I’ll never fully understand, it is still holding pieces of me too.

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.

The Stars Take Note

Part 1: When Love Isn’t Enough to Stay

Not Everyone Who Leaves Stops Loving It