EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Retired Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

I Was Eleven The First Time Nothing Was Expected Of Me

April 21, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

The best times of my young years were the ones spent in the Adirondacks—either living there, or working there, or just existing in that quiet, deliberate way that only seems possible when you are surrounded by trees that have outlived entire generations of people who thought they understood permanence.

I think it began the summer my parents sent me away to summer camp at eleven, which is a strange sentence when I stop and look at it, because it sounds like exile, but it felt like freedom. Those summers were not structured in the way the rest of my life was structured. They were not measured by expectations or outcomes or whether I was good enough at something I never asked to be part of.

Those days were measured in sunlight, in how long I could stay out before someone called my name, in the way pine needles felt under my hiking boots, in the smell of woodsmoke that settled into everything and never quite left. I learned very quickly that I preferred that version of time—the kind that doesn't announce itself or demand anything back.

Things were different back then—I was a child that adults trusted, or maybe a child they simply didn't know how to contain, and so they let me drift. I would sometimes disappear into the edges of the camp property for hours at a time without asking too many questions.

It was the summer of 1991, balanced right on the edge of something I couldn't name yet—the beginning of a decade that would go on to give me everything and take just as much back, though I had no way of knowing that then. At the time, it just felt like open space, like being allowed to move without explanation, with the quiet understanding that I would come back eventually, even if no one knew exactly when.

Since then, I've spent most of my life trying, in one way or another, to return to that state. Not the camp itself, not the cabins or the routines, but the feeling—the absence of pressure, the clarity that comes when there's nothing between you and the world except air and distance.

If I had my way, I would be outside almost all of the time, not because I'm running from anything in particular, but because outside is the only place that has ever felt honest to me. Inside, there are rules, expectations, voices that linger even when no one is speaking. Outside, there is just what is—wind, trees, weather, the slow and unarguable movement of seasons that do not care who you are or what you've done.

But it's not the location, and it's not the people I miss—it's the feeling, the specific, unrepeatable atmosphere of being who I was in those moments, before everything became measured and accounted for. It's the way time moved differently then, the way nothing needed to be justified or explained, the way I existed without the constant awareness of being observed or evaluated. You don't get that back—not because the places disappear, or the people fade, but because you don't arrive there as the same person twice, and the version of you that felt it so fully only ever existed once.

People talk about freedom like it's mobility—as if it's the ability to get in a car and go somewhere else on a whim, or to change the entire direction of their life without consequence, or to wake up one morning and decide to move to a different city and start over again. I've been able to go places, to move, to rebuild, to walk away when necessary—and still, there is this persistent sense that I am not where I want to be, or maybe more precisely, that the version of me that belongs somewhere else, but that perfect place will forever be…just out of reach. My mind has a habit of leaving before I do. It drifts—backward, forward, sideways—into places where maybe I felt more aligned, more correct, even if they only exist as fragments from long ago.

Maybe freedom is simply the absence of the things that make choosing feel heavy in the first place. Constraints, responsibilities, expectations—those invisible social frameworks that shape everything without ever announcing themselves.

Maybe freedom is what's left when those things fall away, even temporarily. A clearing in the woods, not because someone designed it, but because nothing managed to grow there. A moment where nothing is required of you, and nothing is waiting to be evaluated.

I don't think I've ever fully had that—not in a sustained way—but I've come close. In the Adirondacks, in the spaces between assignments, reassignments, and obligations, in the quiet seconds where the world holds still long enough for me to notice that I'm breathing without thinking about it. Those are the moments that feel real. Everything else feels like a negotiation.

Maybe that's the truth of it—the kind that doesn't resolve cleanly. I've built a life that works, a life that functions, a life that, by most standards, would be considered solid and intact. But somewhere in me, there is still that eleven-year-old girl stepping out of her parents station wagon, and into a place that didn't ask her to be anything other than present. She didn't know it at the time, but she was meeting the only version of freedom that ever made sense to her—and she's been trying to find her way back ever since.