No time to say goodbye

I don’t think I’ll ever fully accept that I’m not going back – that the place in the woods, where as I child I had found home, is gone to me now. Well, not gone, just so, so, so far out of reach… and that is my burden to carry, my cross to bear. It was wasn’t Me, but it was my actions that that tore camp from my life. My decisions, my fault.

There’s no blaming "hypomania", although the doctors seem to think this is a perfect scapegoat. "Oh, well she’s bipolar, she didn’t even realize what she was doing, what she was saying." Blaming my illness is a joke. My illness is not me and does not control me, and unless I’m just flat out psychotic, then I certainly could have done things differently.

If I could go back in time, I would have been myself. Maybe I would have still been manic, maybe I would have still been irritable or rude or still have had outlandish ideas and great, wonderful energy…. indeed perhaps these things would still have become a truth of my life… but at least if I had been myself then I could have left knowing that I tried my best. But now I’ll never have that chance again. I’ll never be able to show people my soft and sensitive side, my compassion or my desire to make life better. Instead all people will remember me as is, "that sarcastic bitch who had a bipolar meltdown in front of the whole staff." Great.

I had this dream last night where all my old campers came to visit me. They wanted to say goodbye, and that they would miss me. They told me what I had taught them about themselves. One girl said I taught her to think for herself, one girl told me I taught her to never give up, a boy said I taught that not all adults were bad, another said I taught her the value of silliness… and many told me I taught them to follow their dreams…. I’d like to think these things are not the mad attempts to move on of a disturbed mind.

I mean maybe I fucked up with the staff but one good thing the directors told me is that I didn’t fuck up with the campers, you know, the ones who really matter. They told me that when it came to the campers I had been the kind, quiet girl they had hired… it was just that as a leader people found my ramblings and psychotic bursts quite unsettling…

I must redeem myself, but the thing is, I will never redeem myself at camp. I am not of that world anymore. I am not the sun filtering down through the trees, nor the abandoned boats hidden in the forest, I am not the boy with the golden hair (though he does hold a part of me), nor am I the rocks at vesper. My eyes will no longer gaze at the stars as they fall into the lake, or the ashes that I burned as they dissipate into the water. I will not feel the sliminess of the sand as I wade into the shallows, nor the smallness of a frog as it leaps from my hands, nor the tug of another’s fingers as they guide me through the dark…

I will know only sadness in the absence of these things.

And that is why I will leave camp and those I love from it in the past. I will delete friends off facebook, put away the white hat, hide every memento… buy new sweaters. And camp will not be there to see me when I graduate university, or when I become a doctor. They will never even guess that such a psycho ended up becoming a psychologist, that I will be helping people such as them and guiding those like myself… they will never know the leagues I will run to redeem myself,.

But I will.