Going back to camp after your first spectacular time will disappoint. I never went to the same overnight camp. Not a camp person. I enjoy camping, but surrounding myself with people who cheerfully sing bad songs, make popsicle-stick art, and swim/pee in a junky lake was never my idea of heaven. For me, the woods should be quiet. I get it, though. We can look at camp as a metaphor. You can have this great time at camp, on your junior year abroad, at a destination reunion, and when you sign up for a repeat, you expect the same emotions and unfairly compare the two experiences.

We do it all of the time. No other hyperspace will feel like the one I saw in Star Wars: a new hope. I’m sure some of the jumps into hyperspace have been better, but they lack the holy-moly of my first time.

Going back to my “final” project is giving me the same anxiety. I am not completely done. Done enough for Demo Day, but not done enough for me. I loved my project. It introduced me to ReactJS and allowed me to fully explore and play with it. So what happened? Like the grimey middle schoolers at Camp Crawdaddy, I packed up my things to go home and pick up my summer reading list for the next grade. I put away my project to revisit vanilla JavaScript, jQuery, and AJAX. I made time to learn new things (Canvas, jQueryUI) and play with various APIs.

I need to return to my project, but I’m scared. What if I don’t have as much fun? The thrill of prepping for Demo Day at The Iron Yard is gone. There’s no stress of getting it all done in time. I have no schedule. I also have no cohort friends next to me to start each day with a stand-up. Slack isn’t the same as being in one space and hearing our f-bombs and huzzahs.

And what if I don’t like it anymore?

I stare at it the way my flat-chested, pimple-faced self stared at the cute boys at the bar and bat mitzvah dances. I’m too scared to approach my project. What if it wants to make out behind the bleachers? I’M NOT READY! And without my peers, there’s no pressure. Dang it!

Is it too much to ask that my final project wait for me outside of a church in a red sports car (ok, Aprillia with an extra helmet) and have a cake ready for me?