mental-health

Not Everyone Who Leaves Stops Loving It

/ Kelly Thomas / Leave a comment

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 Sky Is Still Worth It

/ Kelly Thomas / Leave a comment

I was setting bowls down for the cats, just moving through one of those slow, slightly off days that come after being sick. Not bad enough to stop everything, just enough to make it all feel a little distant, like I was a step behind my own life.

They circled my legs, impatient and steady, completely present in a way I wasn’t.

I glanced out the garage door and there it was.

A rainbow stretched wide across the sky like it had been waiting for someone to notice.

And I did what I always do. I stopped.

Because I am the kind of person who chases these things. The sky, the storms, the quiet moments most people pass by. I have stood in fields for stars, driven back roads for light, waited at the edge of days just to catch something fleeting before it disappears.

That part of me hasn’t gone anywhere.

Even sick, even tired, even a little disconnected, I still feel it. That pull. That instinct to look, to notice, to hold onto something beautiful for just a second longer.

I finished setting the bowls down faster than I meant to and went inside.

“Hey, come look.”

She’s four, so she ran like it mattered. Like wonder is something you have to meet halfway or you’ll miss it.

Her hands pressed against the window, her whole face lighting up in a way that felt familiar.

“A rainbow! Aunt Kelly, it’s a rainbow!”

And then, like it was the most obvious truth in the world,
“There’s a pot of gold at the end.”

And I smiled, because I understood her more than she realized.

Not the gold.
But the chase.

Because that’s what it is.

Not just seeing something beautiful, but believing there is something worth moving toward because of it.

I don’t believe there is a literal pot of gold waiting at the end of a rainbow.

But I do believe in standing in the cold for stars.
In chasing storms across open land.
In pulling over on gravel roads because the sky decided to become something more for a few minutes.

I believe in going after wonder like it might slip through your fingers if you don’t.

Standing there, still not fully myself, still carrying that quiet weight of the last few days, I realized something.

Wonder didn’t feel smaller.

It just felt a little further away in that moment.

But it was still mine.

Still there in the way I stopped.
Still there in the way I looked.
Still there in the part of me that will always turn toward the sky.

She saw a pot of gold waiting.

I saw something just as real.

A reason to keep chasing.

So remember to follow it.
Not just to notice the beauty, but to move toward it.
To step outside, to look longer, to go a little further than you need to.

Because wonder isn’t something you either have or lose.

It is something you choose, again and again, every time you decide the sky is worth looking at.

The Night The Sky Couldn’t Hold Itself

/ Kelly Thomas / Leave a comment

If you’re wondering what you’re looking at, these are star trails.

They form when a camera stays still long enough to notice what we usually rush past. It holds its breath, holds its place, and lets the Earth turn beneath it. We’re the ones moving, but the long exposure makes it look like the stars are the ones wandering, sweeping their light across the night like they have somewhere gentle to be.

I think that’s why I love them.
Because they prove something I keep forgetting.
That movement doesn’t always look like progress.
Sometimes it looks like staying in one place long enough for the truth to catch up to you.

What I can’t stop staring at is the reflection in the water.

That doubled sky.
That echo of light.
Like the world was so full that it overflowed and spilled itself into the stillness until even the dark had to carry something bright.

There is something almost painfully tender about that.
How the sky didn’t shrink itself or dim itself or apologize for being too much.
It simply became two skies instead of one.

And maybe that is what hit me.
The reminder that even in silence, even when my days feel stuck or small or swallowed by their own shadows, things are shifting.
Healing is shifting.
Grief is shifting.
I am shifting.
Not loudly. Not obviously. But undeniably.

The water didn’t move, but it mirrored the stars anyway.
And some days I feel like that.
Quiet, unmoving, like nothing is changing at all.
But maybe I am reflecting things I can’t see yet.
Maybe the parts of me that feel still are actually catching light I didn’t know was reaching for me.

I stayed out by the water longer than I meant to.
The grass was cold.
The night smelled like winter trying to arrive too early.
And I felt that familiar ache in my chest, the kind that comes from wanting more than I can name, from missing things I can’t explain, from holding hope and exhaustion in the same trembling hand.

But the stars kept tracing their slow arcs across the sky.
They didn’t hurry.
They didn’t need to.
They simply kept going, one thin line at a time, drawing proof of their persistence in the dark.

I think I needed to see that.

Because lately I have been feeling like I am barely moving.
Like I am suspended between worlds, South Dakota and Virginia, past and future, memory and whatever comes next.
But the camera caught movement my eyes couldn’t.
And maybe that is true for my life too.

Maybe I am changing in ways I won’t recognize until later.
Maybe this season is a long exposure.
Slow, quiet, honest.
Capturing shifts I won’t understand until I step back and see the trails.

Maybe you are in one of those seasons too.

If you are, I hope you remember this.
Stillness is not stagnation.
Quiet is not failure.
And even on the nights when you feel like you are holding your breath, the sky is still moving, and so are you.

Hidden In The Corners

/ Kelly Thomas / Leave a comment

I took this picture at the end of one of those days. The kind where your body feels ancient before the sun even considers setting. Where every muscle aches with the kind of tired that sleep can’t fix. I couldn’t remember the last time I sat down, let alone stopped moving.

I’d been going nonstop since morning— soaked through with sweat and sudden summer rain,
mud on my shoes, hair stuck to my face, filling water coolers, hauling trash bags, fixing what broke before anyone even noticed it had fallen apart. It was the kind of day where the clock slips away from you, where all you can do is keep your head down and push forward because there’s still so much left to do, and you’re the one who does it.

But for a moment—
a rare, fragile moment—
I paused.

I looked up.

And there they were: clouds that held both weight and softness, like they’d been stitched together by lightning and lullabies. They glowed with that strange, storm-lit kind of light—
blue and gold and bruised gray all at once, like the sky couldn’t decide what it was feeling either.

So I took a photo. Something in me said remember this.
Not because it was perfect— but because it was real.
Because something about that sky made me feel like maybe there was more going on than I could see.

Later that night, I was curled up in bed—exhausted, sore, scrolling half-heartedly through my camera roll, just trying to tether myself to something good. And I stopped on that photo again.

And there it was.

A rainbow.

Faint. Hidden in the upper corner. Tucked into the clouds so subtly you could miss it if you weren’t really looking.

And I hadn’t seen it when I took the shot. Not even a flicker. But it was there. It had been there all along.

And I sat there—
staring at that quiet little arc of light—
and felt something crack open in me.

Because that’s what this week has been.
Heavy.
Demanding.
Full of things I didn’t sign up for
and moments that almost broke me.

But it also held things I missed in real time:
a laugh during a water break
that made the weight of the day feel a little lighter.
The wind kissing my face after the storm passed,
reminding me I’m still alive.
The hush of the world right before sunset—
when even the chaos takes a breath.
A rainbow I didn’t know was there
until the day was done.

It reminded me:
Sometimes beauty is quiet.
Sometimes grace doesn’t show up loud and obvious.
It’s tucked in corners,
woven into the ordinary,
soft and steady like a whisper.

And maybe that’s the whole point.

Maybe the good things are still there,
even when we’re too tired to see them.
Maybe the light doesn’t disappear—
it just waits patiently
for us to slow down long enough to notice.

So if your week has felt like mine—
exhausting, unrelenting,
a string of moments that asked too much—
please know this:

There might be a rainbow you missed.
There might be laughter still echoing somewhere in your memory.
There might be grace folded into the day you thought you barely survived.

You are not alone.
Not even close.

Hold on.
Keep going.
There’s still light.
Even in the storm.
Especially in the storm.