#6. Hardest Thing Ever Experienced

20 Til I'm 20:  #6.  Describe the hardest thing you've ever experienced.

For me this is actually an easy one to answer.  The hardest thing I have ever experienced was my summer in New York working at a special needs summer camp.  Besides overcoming my fears of getting lost in an air port and getting robbed on the subway, there were a lot of other hard parts about the summer too.  The schedule was very demanding, working almost 24 hours a day, 6 days a week.  Thankfully I was able to get Sundays off and found a little LDS branch to attend while I was there.  That helped a lot.  The living arrangements.... not so hot.  There was also a unique set of challenges working with special needs campers, especially with so many put together at once.  Campers running away, waking up to a naked 15 year old standing on his bed, being bitten, hair pulled, punched, and trying to keep some of the campers from doing these things to other campers (point of clarification: not all the campers were like this.  They all ranged on levels of functioning and what not).  Though this was an extremely difficult part of the summer, it was also my favorite part.  Working with these people was the most amazing experience.  They all have such unique, beautiful spirits and I feel extremely blessed to have had the chance to share that little amount of their lives with them. They taught me SO much.  I learned a lot about myself and what my limits are and what I can handle.  It has been over a year since this experience now and I can honestly say that not a day has gone by that I haven't thought about those campers and how very dear they are to me.  So you may be wondering why I said this was the hardest thing I've ever been through then.  The main reason why this experience was so hard for me was because of the way that all the other counselors lived while we were off-duty.  I was completely alone in my beliefs and standards while I was at camp and I was given a hard time because of that.  I watched people that I care about and had grown to care about make choices that I knew could effect their lives in very negative ways.  That was hard for me.  I had never felt so alone in my entire life.  But I must say that good things definitely can come from the bad.  I really decided for myself the way I want to live my life (not that I hadn't decided before, but growing up in Utah you are hardly ever faced with what's really out there and you are never alone in choosing the right) and I proved it to myself.  I felt much stronger and solid in my beliefs morals and standards after this experience, and even though it was so hard, in the end it was worth it.