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I got back from camp on Friday and let me tell you it was both awsome and crappy at the same time. Maybe certain people were right when they said I was lame for going to camp instead of band. The whole point of me going to camp was to be a leader to the kids which I thought I did a good job. Some of the campers even admited that I was their favorite JC (junior counselor). Hanging out with the campers was part of what made camp awsome. The other part was the privileges JC's had. We stayed up all night every night raiding the kitchen for leftovers. The crappy part of my camp experience was the other JC's. When I got to camp I realized then what I was getting myself into. These people I knew from grade school and middle school and I wasn't exactly fond of them. I will admit that I am shy but I wasn't always. At my middle school because it was a private school the class sizes were small, very small. My eighth grade class had only twelve people in it. Because the school was small there weren't many kinds of people. I was a nerd and a band geek while the rest of my class were a mixture of jocks and preps. They made fun of me and I "wasn't allowed to hang out with them." I was an outcast, but not the only one. There were two others. A girl named Lauren and a boy named Ryan. I didn't get along to well with Lauren but Ryan became my best friend. With Ryan as my best friend I didn't care what other people thought of me and they thought a lot. They thought I was a freak who was uncool and no matter how hard I tried I never could be. They judged me for everything, everything I did everything I said and everything I wore. If I tried to become "cool" in their eyes they would jugde me even more thinking I was a freak because I thought I could fit in. But again with Ryan as my best friend I didn't care about what they said because he didn't care. Unfortunatly my shield from the world had to leave. At the end of sixth grade Ryan told me he was going to the public middle school. After he left I started caring what other people thought of me. I wasn't myself anymore. Before Ryan left I had glasses and hair so long it almost reached my knees. The other people in my class said my glasses were stupid and my long hair was childish. I never listened to them because Ryan said he liked my hair and all though I was thinking about getting contacts my glasses didn't bother me. When Ryan left everything changed. I got rid of the glasses my classmates said were stupid and replaced them with contacts. I got my hair cut to my shoulders because my classmates thought long hair was childish. And yet I still didn't fit in. I realized that I needed to change how I acted as well. Because I didn't know how to fit in I enlisted the help of my cousin Emily who was an expert at fitting in. My mind was so warped by the idea of fitting in that I was afraid that when I got to high school I would never fit in. I remember my first day of marching band. It was in the summer and I was worried. I predicted that this was where I would make most of my friends and because of my mindset I was worried about making a good impression. That day I let Emily dress me up and teach me what she knew about making a good impression. That first day I didn't talk to many people because I was afraid of making a bad impression. I may not have talked to many people but they talked to me. They first person I met was a junior named Emily (not to be confused with my cousin). She let me share a music stand with her and she kind of introduced me to life in band. After two days of talking to her I realized that nobody cared, that nobody was judging me. With her help I began letting myself be myself. Instead of sharing a stand with her I began sharing a stand with the other two freshman clarinetists who became my best friends. I never would recover from what my past life had done to me though. I had left me shy and a little bit afraid to talk to people, but now I was in a place I belonged. When I went to camp last Saturday July 4th I went back into the world I had escaped from when I joined band and entered high school. I went back into a world where everyone was judging me. The little fifth and sixth grade campers weren't judging me but the JC's were. When I was with the campers life was great but when I was with the JC's I felt like I was in hell. Often times I thought of how I could be at band right then but instead I was in my own personal hell. During those times for some reason I thought of what someone in the band had told me when I told him I was going to camp instead of band. Lame he had called me and now that I think of it he was right. Given the choice I will never choose camp over band ever again. Camp is to Band as Hell is to Heavan.
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