It Just Doesn't Matter

I was flipping through channels the other night when I landed on the 1979 movie Meatballs, just as it was starting. I have a special place in my heart for this weirdly touching comedy about summer camp escapades, a pre-famous Bill Murray leading a ragtag group of counselors-in-training through their first real encounters with love, heartbreak, and the particular absurdity of caring too much about things that turn out not to matter at all. I have seen this film at least a dozen times, possibly more, and I still cannot change the channel.

I settled in. Of course, with popcorn.

There is something about Meatballsthat I find genuinely hard to explain to people who haven't seen it, or who saw it once in 1979 and remember only the pranks. On the surface, it is exactly what it looks like: low-budget, a little chaotic, stuffed with the kind of humor that makes you laugh and then immediately wonder about your choices. But underneath that, it is one of the most quietly honest films about belonging that I have ever seen. Bill Murray's character Tripper doesn't lead with authority or strategy. He leads by showing up, seeing people, and refusing to take the scoreboard seriously.

The scoreboard. That's the part that really resonated with me this time.

Camp Mohawk, the rival camp across the lake, is sleek and well-funded and wins everything. Camp North Star, where Tripper and his motley crew of misfits reside, wins almost nothing, and everyone seems vaguely aware of this fact at all times. The anxiety of it hums underneath the whole film until one glorious, ridiculous scene where Tripper leads the entire camp in chanting, at the top of their lungs: "It just doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter."

And they mean it. And somehow, it works.

I did not go to camp much as a kid. Doreen and Mic were not exactly enthusiastic underwriters of the summer camp experience, which is a polite way of saying it wasn't really in the budget or the philosophy. The few summers I did go were among the best of my childhood. Something about being thrown together with kids you didn't choose, in a place that existed outside your regular life, made everything feel lighter, truer somehow. You couldn't perform your way through a campfire, or KP duty, or singing at the top of your lungs while paddling a canoe. Nobody was tracking anything. You were just there, in the middle of something temporary, and it was enough.

What I didn't understand then, and do now, is how rare that is.

Most of us spend enormous energy running against invisible scoreboards. The marriage that should look a certain way. The life that should be further along by now. The version of ourselves we have been quietly promising to become, just as soon as things settle down. We measure. We compare. We tell ourselves the measuring is motivating when really, it mostly just keeps us too busy to ask whether the scoreboard was ever ours to begin with.

And then something happens. A marriage starts to quietly unravel, or a long-held certainty begins to feel less certain, and the scoreboard suddenly seems beside the point. The question that surfaces is not how do I win. It is who am I when I'm not performing for anyone.

That question is enormous. It can feel like standing in a very large, empty room.

What I have come to believe, after years of doing my own work and walking alongside women doing theirs, is that you don't answer that question alone. Not well, anyway. You answer it the way they answered things at Camp North Star, in the company of people who are also in the middle of it, who have also stopped pretending, who are also sitting with the uncomfortable freedom of a scoreboard that no longer makes sense.

There is something that forms in rooms like that. It is temporary, the way summer is temporary, and it is also completely real. The kind of real that doesn't leave when the session ends, the kind that rewires how you see yourself, how you make decisions, and what you're willing to settle for going forward.

Tripper knew it. He just delivered it wearing tube socks and a whistle.

If any of this is landing somewhere familiar, I'd love to tell you more about a space I'm creating for women who are asking exactly that question. It's intentional in the way that matters, the right women, doing real work, in a space designed for it. More campfire than conference room.

You don't have to have the answers yet. You just have to be willing to show up. If you’d like to learn more about this new experience, respond to this message, and I’ll be in touch.