It’s strange, isn’t it?
We all come here to be closer to nature, to sleep beneath canvas, to trade walls for wind, yet I wonder if some of us are really escaping something.
Maybe that’s why I love it here.
Because a campsite has always felt safer to me than a house ever did.
That thought sits heavy.
I find myself wondering— does this mean I had good memories? Am I remembering wrong? Am I making too much of it? Were my parents really that bad?
The questions arrive like unwanted rain.
But then I look closer at the memories themselves.
On a campsite, I was rarely with my family.
I was wandering.
Exploring.
Meeting strangers who became friends for a week.
Running barefoot between tents.
Inventing versions of myself.
Staying out until the sky turned pink and the first stars appeared.
On a campsite, I belonged to nobody.
And somehow, that made me feel free.
I wasn’t being watched.
I wasn’t waiting for moods to change.
I wasn’t listening for footsteps.
I was simply a child.
A real child.
The kind that gets dirty knees and sunburnt shoulders, who spends whole days chasing adventure and forgets to look at the clock.
Maybe that’s why I feel safe here now.
Not because everything was good.
Not because my childhood was happy.
But because this was one of the few places where I could breathe.
One of the few places where I could disappear into myself without fear.
The campsite became my refuge.
A small patch of earth where I learned what freedom felt like.
And perhaps that feeling never really left.
So now, when I wake to birdsong and unzip a tent door, when I smell damp grass and hear distant laughter,
my body remembers before my mind does.
It remembers the girl who found safety in open spaces.
The girl who could not always be free, but was free here.
And maybe that is why a campsite still feels like the safest place in the world.
Not because nothing bad ever happened.
But because, for a little while,
I got to be a child.
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