Jack's Camp Friends Newsletter |
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Saturday night, I was hunched over the toilet, 100% sure I was about to lose it. The contents of my stomach, I mean.
A bug was making its way through camp, and it finally came for me.
Was up most of the night waiting to be sick. Though the “show” never started, it was just me and the bathroom tile, hour after hour.
Somewhere in there, between waves of feeling awful, it hit me that I’ve gotten pretty good at one half of this job and let the other half quietly slip through the cracks.
Two Modes
If you run a camp or work at one, you know these two modes even if you’ve never named them.
Mode 1 is real camp life. A kid is crying. The kitchen needs an answer in the next ten seconds. You react, you listen, you care about the actual people in front of you. It’s the part most of us got into camp for in the first place.
Mode 2 is the screen. Email, planning, registrations, the sales sequence, the thing you promised three people you’d send. It’s slower and quieter, and it’s where a huge amount of camp actually gets built.
Most of the year, you move between them without thinking about it. In the summer, that balance can go sideways.
The Mode I’ve Struggled With
This summer, I have lived almost entirely in Mode 1. And I have been genuinely bad at Mode 2.
If you’ve emailed me or texted me, you might have noticed this.
The messages, emails, and phone calls still matter, of course. But spend all day reacting to whatever is staring you in the face, and the switch into screen mode takes a kind of energy you’ve already ditched by dinner.
Sitting down to write a careful message after a day like that feels like trying to run a 5K right after you’ve donated blood.
One small example sums it up.
A parent wrote in, questioning why our Campanion photos (love Campanion btw) had been released differently this year. A totally fair thing to ask about. The only trouble is, I had no idea it had even changed.
Someone made a reasonable call weeks earlier, and I was finding out about it from an email while standing in the middle of ten other things.
That’s just the texture of Mode 1. You are the person everyone brings things to, in real time, all day long. It’s a good job. It also quietly eats the other one.
The Litmus Test
I can’t always feel which mode has me buried. When I’m in it, it just feels like the job. But there’s a gauge, and for me, it’s my inbox.
When my email goes dark for days, that’s the tell that Mode 1 has taken over completely. And this week, for the first time in a while, I caught myself answering things again.
Replying to the stuff that had been sitting there too long, I didn’t feel any different, really. But the async work started moving, and that turned out to be the first honest sign I was climbing back toward the middle. That and cranking out a quick newsletter about puking.
So if you’re in the thick of camp with an inbox that hasn’t been touched in a week, maybe take it as a reading on where you are, nothing more.
It just means Mode 1 has you, which happens to so many of us in July. And when the replies start flowing again, even before you feel steady, that’s things getting unclogged.
The work that only lives in your head is the first thing to go when a summer gets noisy and fun and energy-filled. Getting it out of my head, into a system or a person I trust, is probably my whole project for next year.
I didn’t puke, and the inbox is moving again. I’ll take it as a good sign.
You got this,
Jack
PS - We are still rocking with Write From Camp on Substack all summer. 3x per week. Check it out.
