Category: Summer Camp

I love a hello. A howdy. A sup. A how’s it going. Hellos are easy. If it’s been a long time they’re even better. Hugging someone you haven’t seen in too long. Instantly falling back into old routines and habits. That person can take you back to a time and place. They can fill you with memories long forgotten. I wish that life could be all hellos.

I remember when I was a camper there was nothing like that first day back in the div. All the fellas rolled up and saw who they were in cabin with. Who their councilors were. And by the time the last parent had driven off it was like no time had passed at all. We were back under the pines and life was simple and good once more. It was the best.

But with every hello comes a goodbye. It’s part of the contract. Nothing lasts forever. And at least for me, goodbyes are hard. I struggle to find the words when the ending finally comes. I remember leaving camp for the last time. I walked around unsure of what to say or how to say it. Camp had taught me so much. But it had yet to teach me how to say goodbye for good.

I knew it was the end of the line for many of the friendships I had fostered over the years. There would be no more hellos for so many of us. As I drifted around I jotted a few phone numbers down, hugged a couple of pals and ultimately decided it was easier to just get in the car and go.

Despite the hollow feeling this left me with, I continued this pattern for years. At birthday parties, or group hangouts I would often Irish Goodbye. Without a word I would depart and be gone before anyone knew it.

Those decisions still eat at me. There are people I wish were still in my life. People I wish I had closed the book with. But I left the last page unread. I knew an ending was coming and I pulled back. I chose the easy way out. I knew it was wrong and yet I did it anyway. I chose short term ease and now faced the long term guilt.

When I graduated college I fell into the familiar pattern. I said a couple small farewells but when I packed up my car and drove home there were many people I neglected to properly say goodbye to. People I would likely never see again.

But after I got home, something changed. I was fed up with myself and my actions. I decided things would be different this time. I picked up my phone and called or texted all of the people I had failed to say goodbye to in person. It didn’t erase the guilt entirely. But it got me on the right path.

Since then I have had many goodbyes. Some when I left Boston to come work at camp. Some when my friends left camp after last summer and I stayed behind. Others were the final goodbye to a loved one. All of them were painful. All of them felt a little awkward. But I do not lament a single one. The chapter of my life that each of those people occupied feels complete, finished, and without loose ends.  

The shadows have grown long on this session. Before you know it they will be long on this summer. It is later than you think. But it is not too late. If you are like me and too often you find yourself standing on the edge and walking back, I urge you to take the plunge. Life is filled with regrets. Saying goodbye to your friends will never be one of them.

If there is someone here, or across the lake that has impacted you this summer, they deserve a goodbye. Go up to them, give them a hug and tell them what their friendship meant this year on the lake. Endings are hard, but they are necessary. Read that last page. Close the book. You won’t regret it.

I’m Millie and at 11:56pm on April 9th, I began to cry. For context my birthday is April 10th, and I don’t think I have ever not cried on a birthday. When I was 9 years old it was because I had just moved to Massachuasetts and had no close friends, when I was 13 it was because my hair didn’t straighten just quite right and I didn’t like my outfit. At 16 I rang in the most pathetic birthday alone because I could only see my friends on the porch for 15 minutes due to covid, and as I turned 18 I competed in my last ever dance competition after competing for 14 years. 

Although all of these past memories hold a sore spot in my heart, this year as I turned 20 the tears felt unfamiliar and unsettling. First of all, I was just as close to being 10 as I was to 30, which is unnerving in itself. Second, I felt like the 20s had a sort of weight to it, a pressure to hit most of my major life accomplishments in just 10 short years. Most terrifying of all I was saying goodbye to my childhood.

I have always had a fear of leaving things. I think I hid in the bathroom every check out day as a camper, cried my eyes out graduating elementary school, and middle school, and high school, and pretty often as I ended TV series or comfort movies. To be even more dramatic I always count my lasts, even when it feels ridiculous. For example I distinctly remember thinking to myself at 14 as I walked to my bedroom it would be the last time climbing up the stairs in my house with braces on. It has become such a constant fear that anything and everything will always come to an end and no matter how many lasts I count I always feel like these ends have a way of sneaking up on me.

This fragility of happiness and grasping the last whispers of the moment, as you could put it, has always lingered in my mind and has taken up much of my headspace as I lay in bed at night. As with many things in my life, days feel long, weeks feel short, and it feels as though eventually I will be faced with the fact that whatever I am doing will inevitably end and I will have to move on to the next thing. 

I wish I could say I have developed some sort of strategy for all of this, something that was foolproof enough to stop me from getting intensely emotional at the drop of a hat. But I have come to find out that only with experience, time, and loss have I truly understood what it is like to face the fears of leaving. 

I have watched my birthday pass year after year, seen the end of many milestones, aged out of things that once defined my life, and said goodbye to people pretty indefinitely, I have found that there truly is always something else out there. I won’t lie and say that I don’t still mourn the loss of childhood, the end of my competitive dance career, my ski team friends and my camp friends from summers and summers ago, but I do know that as I continue to move through these goodbyes, I find more things to consume me and fill my identity. 

As I bid adieu some of the activities and memories that have defined my life as I know it I have found that there is peace in there endings. Peace knowing that every moment and memory I made will not leave me, and that the cumulative experience of these memories will still be apart of who I am. Looking forward to the rest of my 20s, I know that my childhood is still within me, I dance on my college dance team, I find the occasional weekend to play in the snow with my ski friends, and somehow year after year I still find myself coming back to this place. 

Someone was telling me once about the way they think about goodbyes. They said, if your going to miss something, it means it meant something to you. As I look back on all the things I miss, I realize I’m incredibly grateful to have such a feeling. Although it feels hard for me to move on from the sorrow of the last 19 years of my life, as I  start to look past it I’m overwhelmed with the happiness that I have something worth looking back on. 

I’m still the girl that hid in the bathroom, cried at graduations, and wipes tears at the crux of a movie, yet I am also the girl who can move past these things. After taking my time to face these fears and truly move on and find the next beautiful thing, I am able to tackle what feels like the 10 most intimidating years of my life step by step, goodbye by goodbye. 

So, as you start (or continue) to count your lasts, really embrace them, but let them go. It may be hard to say goodbye to this place for a year or more, or it could be the easiest thing you have ever done. Whatever your next destination is, don’t be afraid to say goodbye to this place, as it will always be a part of you, and you apart of it. 

At the end of last summer, I packed up everything I owned into one large hiking bag and then traveled over 30 hours to live and work in Thailand. I spent 6 months teaching English to 50 1st graders and then 2 months living out of a backpack while traveling. For those of you who were here last summer, you may have heard me talk about my decision to go to Thailand in a vespers, and I have probably talked a few people’s ears off this summer about how much I loved it.

For a while after I came back, I pretended that I had completely thought that decision through, and I knew that I was going to switch my career path completely from criminal justice to teaching in the middle of this year. But that simply is not true. I essentially ended up on a plane to Thailand at the end of last summer, as a result of what was supposed to be a joke. Essentially, I responded to Izzy Melia’s, who some of you may remember as a former staff member here at camp’s, private instagram story that she had posted asking if anyone wanted to come with her to Thailand. I said, “actually, yeah” and she spent the next three weeks facetiming me to see if I had actually sent in my application. And me, being afraid to tell her that I was joking, submitted my application and committed to go.

For a few months prior to applying to teach in Thailand, I had been toying with the idea of wanting to switch my focus to education and I wanted to get involved with classroom teaching. But I had literally no idea how to do it. I didn’t go to school for teaching, I had no formal training in teaching, and I wasn’t licensed either. I would have to start from the beginning, and I was apparently going to do it in a whole new country which I knew nothing about and hadn’t learned a single word of the language.

Although I was excited to go on this adventure and I knew I would enjoy learning and experiencing a new culture, I was admittedly freaking out about being good at my job. What if I got there and I was just a bad teacher? What if I hated teaching? What then? Would I really come back to America to try teaching just to fail?

I had a lot of unknowns, and so much I had to learn how to do. I spent hours watching youtube videos about lesson planning, classroom management and how to teach elementary reading and writing. I scrolled through endless pdfs of reading packets, worksheets, phonics lessons, and had playlists of children’s songs to help with language acquisition but I still felt like I wasn’t prepared and I would fail my students.

During my extensive panic research about teaching, I also spent a lot of time trying to learn as much as I could about Thailand itself. This led to a whole lot of doom scrolling on various travel influencers’ feeds for any and all information I could find. Every video I could find about Thailand always included the phrase Mai Pen Rai. All of the Tik Toks I watched about ‘the 5 most important words to learn in Thai’ all had mai pen rai as the number one most important word to learn, ranked higher than the word for hello. They were all right, almost immediately, I noticed how often I would hear that phrase being said by Thai people. Mai Pen Rai essentially translates to ‘its alright’ or ‘everything is fine’. And I came to understand in my first weeks living in the country, that Mai Pen Rai was not just a common phrase used in conversation but essential to understanding the Thai way of life. The first answer to most questions, problems, or apologies was always “Mai Pen Rai”.

When I first started teaching, I was full of questions and anxiety about whether or not I was doing the right thing pretty much all of the time. I asked a lot of questions. When I would worry about missing the bus, someone would say ‘mai pen rai it will come back for you’’. When I was confused about how I should structure my class, my co teacher said, ‘mai pen rai you’ll do whatever you think is best’. When Izzy thought she had contracted dengue fever, the answer was ‘mai pen rai, you’ll be ok’.

To be honest, there were times that I would get a little frustrated when someone would say mai pen rai to me, because sometimes I really wouldn’t feel like everything would be ok and I really wanted to be told what to do. I never felt like I could answer these questions myself.

Slowly, I realized that the people who were telling me it would be ok weren’t just brushing me off to let me struggle on my own. Instead they were using it as a motivational reminder that I was capable of overcoming struggles, insecurities, and confusion. Yes, it’s ok to ask for help and need support from the people around you, but often you have all of the knowledge and skill to answer your own questions. That feeling of imposter syndrome that I had was completely self imposed, and I allowed my own worry to cloud my understanding that I knew what I was doing. I’ve worked with kids for pretty much my entire life, and that knowledge and wisdom didn’t just disappear now that I was in a new environment.

Once I had let go of my internalized fear of failing, I began to actually enjoy my job. It allowed me to focus on getting to know my students, and be creative in my classroom rather than stick to a ridgid plan that I thought school was supposed to be like. When I would feel like I just had no idea what I was doing, or when I missed home I had to remind myself ‘mai pen rai’ . I just have to trust that it will be ok. I’m going to be ok, because even though I might not have all of the answers I can trust my inner ability to overcome hardships simply because I know I’m capable of doing so.

For all of you sitting in this circle, you are all here in this new environment surrounded by old friends and new ones. You may have been excited to come to camp, or maybe a little nervous, or maybe a little bit of both. And that’s totally normal! Feeling nervous, confused, happy, sad, excited, or unsure about something is all ok. You just have to trust that you have an inner strength and power that can help you through whatever is standing in your way. If you are ever feeling unsure while you are here at camp, just remember, Mai Pen Rai. It will be ok, because you have yourself and so many people around you that believe in you. So you just have to believe in yourself.