I spent my first summer at Keystone Camp for Girls in 1996, and have returned nearly every summer since, as camper and counselor. Progressively, it became a place where I was whole and alive. When I got married I thought my summers at camp would be the greatest sacrifice. Turned out, my sweet husband didn’t even ask me to sacrifice them. I have returned for two summers of camp since being married. Last summer, I think, was when this all began. More than ever, I felt the elation of camaraderie. I was buddies with the higher-ups; after the campers were asleep—elves and pixies in their tree-abodes, lit with the warmth of youth—those in our inner sanctum would lounge on the carpet of my friend’s office, heavy with the scent of Golden Retriever, our bodies contorted to accommodate the notably athletic limbs of our select elite in the cramped staff-director office. I don’t remember what we talked about, I just remember the sense of belonging. And the next thing I know I’m sprawled out on my belly in the next room, weeping, because I have to leave, because it can’t be like this forever, because I had decided to get married the day before I turned twenty, because I had dropped out of college, because I had become overweight, because what I had to look forward to at home was watching Laguna Beach and eating Frosties with my only friend.

It came in waves throughout the year. I signed up for a course at the Red Cross to become a Certified Nurse Assistant. I got a job on the cardiac unit of the nicest hospital in town. I felt proud of what I was doing in my sensible tennis-shoes and well-fitting scrubs and tidy ponytail. I felt safe and inconspicuous. People there called me Mary, instead of my much preferred Mary Ann, but that was fine, because the person they thought I was—quiet, conservative, obedient, task-oriented, conventional—may as well have been a Mary. I grew tired of my job there, and quickly progressed to loathing it to the point of illness. It made me sick to think about it, sick to go to bed, sick to wake up, sick to clock in and out, sick to ride the shuttle from the parking lot to the hospital in the dark like a prisoner. I thought I was pregnant—the perfect explanation! That accounted for the nausea, the feelings of purposelessness, the terrible mornings, the lethargy, the emotions. But my perfect out was derailed. No baby, just crazy.

I chose literature as my drug. I first picked the reliability of Jane Austen, a tried and true favorite. Child’s play. I experimented with Elizabeth Gaskell, not yet daring to venture from the security of nineteenth-century feminine British writings. I felt a sense of community in Cranford, like I had at camp, but I wanted more. And then I found it—the ecstasy of literary works—Muriel Barbery: The Elegance of the Hedgehog. I was entranced, connected, one with every character, flipping pages like a true addict, elated by the play of words, the exquisite refinement, the naked humanity, the relationships…jasmine tea, camellias and moss, french pastries…

And then it returns: the camellias are gone, the book is closed, and I am left to my suddenly infantile, feline self, curled up as tightly as I can be and crying unexpected, violent tears of only the truly insane, mourning bitterly my own psychosis. I immediately picture my true child self, with an endearingly unfortunate bowl cut and a magenta Patagonia pullover, coloring and playing in the woods. This brings on a new, more intense wave of lamentation. I picture that little girl as if she were my offspring rather than my own self, and I love her ever so dearly. She is the light of my world, and I believe that she will grow up to do wonderful things. She is a spitfire and a sparkling, radiant, unpredictable specimen. I am Narcicistically enamored with this version of me, and then in an instant, I am my grown-up, overweight self, eating stew like an urchin in a hospital cafeteria, drenching my sleeves, maneuvering clumsily in this Amazon’s body that seems so disproportionate to my passions for finer, daintier things. I miss my childhood self and feel a homesick longing for that era, when I felt at ease in my frame and state. I am panicking, shouting frantically like a mad hen. I conjure a fleeting image of my dad, and I project all of my own self-disappointment onto his psyche, and am overwhelmed with shame and remorse, for his sake, for the way I turned out. I picture that little blood soaked sparrow who redeems rooms and houses and temples, and I want her so desperately to fly her little redemptive life over my squandered one, and it’s then that I weave my body around itself, withdrawn in a fruitless hunt for solace.

But they are true, these friends of mine. I will continue to age. The years will fly by and grind slowly, and I will not be that little girl with the bowl cut. I will be too old for camp, and youth will pass me by, but they are true, these friends of mine. Because I bared my soul to them, and they to me. And how those cries resounded—the aching for meaning, the despair of these days when we are behind desks and leaving school and chasing our callings like our shadows. We are literary scholars and scientists and engineers and writers; we are painters and readers, singers and lovers; we are feminists and influential leaders and white-water paddlers, and here we are, settling and deflating and stagnating. But what strange, sweet comfort, to be known and understood, to share the common twenty-something plight. They are true, these friends of mine, and their faces are honey-warm and streaked with sunlight in the slideshow of my mind now, and my house is full of roses. This is the stuff of life.