I was incredibly excited and honored to be accepted into Teen Ink’s summer writing program in New York. To be perfectly and utterly honest however, I expected writing camp to be dorky and not all that exciting. I was wrong. So wrong in fact that I feel as if I might need to hang my head in shame for thinking such a thing. The people I met at Teen Ink’s New York Summer Writing Program aren’t my best friends. They’re my sisters, or more like my twins. It seems that I have 32 sisters and we all somehow got separated at birth because for fourteen days you could often hear, “No way! You like that too?” being echoed throughout the dorm rooms. I didn’t expect to have everyday be the best day of my life. I didn’t expect to have so much fun that leaving made me cry. There were so many amazing memories made that I’m smiling just thinking about them. All of the late nights staying up past our bed time sharing secrets, eating popsicles in Central Park, and freaking out because Channing Tatum was across the street were some of the best moments in my life. This program was so amazing that at one point I was sitting on the air conditioning on the 28th floor of Juilliard with a notebook and pink pen on my lap and realized that somehow I’d found myself. In that moment in time I completely figured out who I was and what I wanted to do, all because of the program. That feeling is so peaceful and wonderful yet completely indescribable. For fourteen days I was one hundred percent me. Maybe it was the blissful six hours of writing we did every day or the hundreds of secrets shared or the city of New York itself but I was a confident, happy me not the insecure, shy one I usually am. I can’t express how amazing those two weeks were but I’m not going to get too cliché here because as I learned, using clichés in writing isn’t a good thing. So I’ll leave it off saying thank you to everyone who made those two weeks the best fourteen days of my life. I can honestly say that those weeks were completely perfect and I wouldn’t trade the experience for the world.