Attachment

I don't remember much from my first CTY experience some 5 years ago, but I do recall the director's opening words: that the friends you made there would be among the closest you would ever have.

And just like nearly every other CTYer, after the three week session, I found myself agreeing with him. Post-CTY depression was a very real thing for me; it was painful to accept that I would never see the overwhelming majority of those people ever again - people who had, by far, been the closest friends I'd ever known.

But then I went to CTY again next summer, and the summer after that, and the summer after that. And before long, I found myself questioning the nature of these friendships.

The first three or so days of every summer program, people are all trying to grab a foothold in this new society that they've suddenly found themselves in. For some, that means finding people similar to friends back home. For others, it means laboring to establish a new identity (or refining a previous identity) that allows them to try on a new persona and its accompanying social characteristics and obligations.

It doesn't matter which path you take out of social irrelevance and obsolescence. You are going to get attached. You need that foothold, and you'll grow to depend on it. Then it abruptly disappears. You pass in your room keys, you sign those t-shirts, and sooner or later, you start to miss it. You feel like a part of you has left, and you're right.

Yet this time around, I noticed that I hadn't really gotten attached at all. I didn't feel one way or the other about all these people that I would never see again. I wasn't sad, or happy, or confused. I was nothing.

My heart tells me I should be concerned.

Is it that I've forgotten how to get attached? Have I regressed to the fatalist long-term thoughts that my entire senior year was trying to remove?

Or is it that I'm afraid?