Happy Friday from Camp Counselor Gail
buckle up, she's feeling deep
Happy Friday! I’m writing this in my apartment in Chicago, but my heart is still in Camp Arcadia (where I was in actuality just one short week ago!).
I was two months old when I first visited Camp Arcadia, and I spent one magical week there per year until I was 22. For most of each summer, Camp Arcadia is a family camp — a place for families to disconnect from the world and reconnect with nature, their faith, and each other — but for two weeks each June, the camp is overrun by teenagers. Hear me say: Those two weeks are the best. My dad first began serving as the Dean of “Teen Week” (now called Omega Week, with the other teen week known as Alpha Week) in 1988 — so by the time I came along in 1994, Teen Week was as locked into our family’s ethos as Liverpool Rummy, chicken pot pie, and inexplicably calling the remote control a “cajeeter” (???). I went from a “camp kid” (with my siblings and our lifelong summertime besties — fellow camp kids whose parents were counselors for the week alongside my dad) to a Teen Week camper (an era during which I spent far more time agonizing over every interaction with my camp crush than I did engaging in camp activities) to a summer staffer (a magical experience during all three of my college summers, where I lived and worked with about 40 fellow college students while we ran the camp). My role at Teen Week has taken on many forms, but my love for the week has never wavered — it’s not perfect, but many of the happiest memories of my life have taken place at Teen Week and/or with the people I’ve met there.
Throughout my 20s, I served as an Omega Week counselor off and on. It’s a big commitment to take an entire week off of work to go traipse through the woods with teenagers who think you’re uncool, and the timing didn’t always align with my work schedule, PTO availability, or life stage. Prior to this year, I most recently completed a week as a counselor in 2022, the last year my dad served as Dean before he retired from the role. I took a few years off while I mourned the end of that era of my family, and I finally felt ready to return in 2025.
It happened so fast! It went from Sunday to Saturday in the blink of an eye! I spent last week as one of 14 adult counselors (ranging in age from 23 to 60-something), sharing three meals per day + all daily activities with ten high-school-aged angels (There were 140 kids total, so we were each responsible for a group of ten). We played dodgeball, we canoed, we square danced, and we talked about the kids’ lives, anxieties, identities, and faith journeys. I was deeply humbled to walk these kids through their week together, and I’m so moved by the fact that I get to have a small footnote in each of their stories. Watching Teen Week “work” never fails to amaze me (despite personally seeing it work nearly 30 times), and it is truly one of the honors of my life to experience it alongside the fellow counselors, several of whom are my dearest friends.
When I returned to my office this week, my coworker/friend Greta asked me such an insightful question. “What was a part of yourself you got to experience at camp,” she asked, “that you want to bring back with you to real life?” (Greta! So wise!)
I didn’t have an immediate answer, but it reminded me of a message shared by last week’s Dean, Matt. He discussed how easy it is to compartmentalize parts of ourselves (like packing cubes in a suitcase), especially when we leave a place like Camp Arcadia. We’re our “camp selves” for a week, then we go back to being our “work selves” or “school selves.” If I’m being frank (and naive?), I honestly thought I was the only one who did that.
Camp Arcadia is where I feel most like myself (and always have), but I’m quick to shed my Birks and my backpack once I’m back in the city. My camp self is confident, friendly, relaxed, and she makes a mean chocolate shake, but my work self uses a Zoom filter and cares about her Peloton streak. Senior Counselor Clare (one of my absolute best friends and the wife of one of the aforementioned fellow former camp kids, Andrew) shared some knowledge last week about how everything is intertwined and everything is spiritual — not just at camp, but in everyday life and in everything we do, say, consume, or create. Unlike both Matt and Clare, I don’t have any particular wisdom to share — but I want to make it known that I’m actively working on allowing my many selves (the camp counselor, the social media manager, the aunt, the pastor’s kid, the city dweller, the bleeding heart tree hugger, and many more) to coexist in a way that is both spiritually aligned and fulfilling. I love both Starlight Vespers at Camp Arcadia and the espresso martinis at Luxbar. I own Chacos and a Staud Tommy bag. I spent a week in the woods and the next one at my computer. I don’t know what to make of all that, but I know I don’t want any of it to change.
I hope you spend even five minutes this weekend as a part of yourself that you’ve allowed to fall to the wayside. Maybe it’s the athlete, the band kid, the camp counselor, or the musician. I want my many selves to coexist, and I hope you let yourself do the same.
Thank you for reading!
XO,
Gail