I went to sleep away camp once — and only once.
I hated it.
I made my parents pick me up early. (I told them I was scared because some kids were smoking pot — which was true — and they came right away!)
The only camp I liked was day camp and only when I was the counselor (hints of unemployability?).
The truth is, for the first 15 years of my life, I didn’t want to leave home, unless it was for work.
Like Barak Obama, my first “real” job was at Baskin Robbins. But before that, I answered phones at my parents’ factory and I did a lot of babysitting – not to mention reselling wax lips from the Ice Cream Man to kids in my 5th grade class. (Does that count?)
But I digress. I liked camp when I could be in charge.
That’s why I'm thrilled to be a Camp Counselor once again for Terri Trespicio’s annual Summer Camp. It's July 18-21 and it will be amazing!
The theme is “breaking the rules” – which is right up my alley – and my topic is trusting ourselves.
So I've been thinking about who I've trusted.
I know better than to trust the part of me that:
- wants something too much or for the wrong reasons
- feels desperate sometimes, even when everything is actually just fine
- is afraid, when there’s nothing to be afraid of
But even when I didn’t trust myself, I knew to trust others.
Somehow, even early on, I knew to trust the market to tell me what it needed. That way I didn’t need to know if I was "right" about what I was doing.
And I eventually trusted my teachers, who always saw more clearly and thought more logically than I did. I even learned how to start thinking like them, by importing parts of their brain into mine.
But it took me a while to trust myself – you know why?
That’s what we’ll be talking about at Summer Camp.