I went to camp as a child for five summers and then worked at a camp as a teenager for six summers, and the friends I have from both of those experiences are unlike any other.
When you spend eight hours a day, five days a week with people for two months, inevitably, you are going to form a special bond with these people. A bond so special that even years later, you can still call some of them your best friends. I am lucky enough to have many camp friends and I will always be lucky enough to call them my best friends.
Camp itself is a very special place.
The lack of technology at camp makes it so unique and it is something you are sure not to find anywhere else. At camp, it is about the people you are with and only those people. You aren't spending the day texting and scrolling through social media, you are spending the day forming relationships with the other people at camp.
Getting to know so many other people who share the same values as you and want the same thing from their summer job is a feeling unlike any other. A feeling that I am lucky enough to experience year after year when I return to camp.
Camp friends have seen you in your truest form and they still love you, and that is something special. Not only do they see you like that, but they meet you like that.
Camp is such a pure place that everyone walks in being themselves from day one and you get to know people for who they really are.
I have had many other jobs and not a single other one is like this. Everyone is always so caught up in protecting their perfect image that they forget to just be themselves, but camp isn't like that. This is the one place where your friends really get to know and love you for who you are and not who you want them to think you are.
Camp also has a way of bringing the most genuine people together. I have never met more people with more pure intentions than the people at camp. No one is at camp for the personal advances, everyone is there for a fun summer where they can forget about the craziness of their everyday lives.
We all love camp and wouldn't want to spend a summer anywhere else. This is something so unique to camp because nowhere else do people love their job as much as they love camp.
My camp friends are some of the most incredible people in my life. They have seen me at my lowest lows and my highest highs. They are so special, and no other friends are like them. These friends are the most genuine people I have ever met and I am lucky to know them. Calling them just my camp friends is a complete understatement because they are more than that, they are my best friends.