On my old camp, and letting go.

For seven years, I attended a camp. CTY, or the Center for Talented Youth, is a program run by Johns Hopkins University for..smart kids. We (and an article in the New Yorker published years ago, which circled the campus in countless photocopies, to our delight) called it nerd camp. It's based in various college campuses across the country; mine for the latter five years was Dickinson, in Pennsylvania. You live in the dorms over a three-week session, and take a course on a normal school day schedule, generally at college- or advanced high school- level. We all had to take the SATs in seventh grade and score high in order to qualify for the program.

What brought most of us to CTY was our heightened desire to learn. What made most of us stay until we turned sixteen - the last year of eligibility - was the community. For many students, it was one of the first times people had really understood them. CTY was a place of education, but also of geeky references and deep conversations and a feeling of belonging that was out of reach for some in the 'real world'. One year the site director described it as living inside a bubble; the bubble was safe and friendly and felt like our home. Finally people could really be proud to be nerds.

It is important, I think, in those years, to have a place like CTY. If you are a kid who is sitting alone in the school cafeteria most days, reading a book..no more. Philosophical discussions cropped up everywhere, and people actually knew their stuff. It was common to see someone trying to memorize as many digits of pi as they could, just so they could look cool. Finding people who are like you instills confidence that before was not able to develop. (We had a common enemy, too: At Dickinson there is another summer camp, a ballet camp, and we would laugh about the 'rinas as they would laugh about us. We weren't allowed to talk to them.) We worshipped Douglas Adams and Rubik's cubes and Godzilla and Rocky Horror. Separated from all electronic media - computer access was virtually nonexistent; occasionally it would be required to write essays, but that was during study hall in the evening, or during classtime - we played card games and made duct tape art and danced all the way to the dining hall blasting Daft Punk from a pair of speakers and an iPod. Every afternoon there would be two scheduled activities run by the RAs, picked from lists the night before - 'mandatory fun'. These ranged from running around campus impersonating velociraptors to forming protest groups for such mundane things as Delaware to watching as many episodes of Invader Zim as possible in the relatively short period of time. Don McLean's American Pie was our theme song; everyone on campus knew the lyrics, and we danced to cues. And then there was Passionfruit. A group of whoever was willing to wake up at seven on a weekend morning to sit in a huge circle on the grass in the quad and toast, one by one, the things and the people that they loved.

Two years ago was my last summer at CTY. I was dreading the end. Three weeks passed too quickly. I had had one more year than most students got, being a year younger than the majority when I first took the qualifying test. ('Baby CTY', which I attended the summers after fifth and sixth grade, was held on different campuses with different classes, and was a completely different experience. Most people only got four years of the real deal.) By that year I and a group of my friends held high status; we were known mostly as the Cult, and referred to ourselves as such. Three of us, Reggie, Sarah, and I, had met during our first year at Dickinson, and two years later had become the base of the Cult; everyone who was a part of it knew everyone else because one of the three of us initially befriended them. We were a web. And in the summer of 2008, I was getting ready to leave the place that for years, many of us had called our second home.

While there, I was choked up.

After I left campus - almost immediately, in fact - I was over it.

I'm serious. I resolved myself at that moment to the fact that CTY was no longer a part of my life, that it was my past and that no period of mourning would be necessary. Each year after the session ended, we would go through what we called 'CTY withdrawal'. We missed it and each other achingly. We would keep in touch through email; the Cult has a Googlegroup, which allows messages and all replies to all members of the group. But in 2008, I was finished. I still kept in touch with my friends. I still missed the camp rather distantly. But while I used to always talk and fantasize with the older members of the Cult about returning as soon as possible as RAs or TAs, I no longer did. It would be fun to go back to work, I decided, but it wasn't..pressing. I no longer had that tugging urge to go back. I was done with CTY.

I am vaguely disturbed by my lack of sentimentality. When I became too old to attend, I seemed to completely detach it from the realm of my emotions. This scares me. I wonder, was this my hopeless resolve kicking in? The same thing that I'm afraid will stop me from thinking about dudeperson, from caring about forming relationships at all. I think that I might be subconsciously trying to protect myself from being hurt, but apathy is pretty damned scary. I want to finally be able to feel without being guarded. I want to be able to react and not worry so much about the consequences. My mom's always telling me that I worry so much before something happens that nothing ever can happen. That's probably the real reason why I have no life. Stop holding me back, Olivia. Stop holding me back.

So, back to CTY. I could have been stopping myself from feeling anything so that it wouldn't be so hard to leave a part of my life behind.

Then again..maybe I was just growing up.

Olivia