The Winnipeg Folk Festival, although seen by many as the pinnacle of Winnipeg music festivals, for me was a nightmare of sunburn, sadness and heatstroke.

Every year, I feel left out when it comes to Folk Fest enthusiasm. I feel like I just cannot relate to the excitement people have when talking about this festival from my nightmares.

The festival sounds great in theory — a long weekend of frolicking in fields, listening to folk music and seeing your friends. These all sound like activities I’d enjoy, but the festival’s   reality is far from that.

Where people see the music festival of their dreams, I see hordes of drunk people wandering Birds Hill Park en masse. Where others see a relaxing afternoon of sun tanning, I see myself being burnt to a crisp.

I cannot help feeling like I am missing the fundamental part of why people keep coming back every year.

I feel like Folk Fest is a community of people built on the premise of having a good time and being kind to one another, and yet I cannot help feeling like an outsider.

The few times I have been to Folk Fest, I always end up feeling miserable. I always feel like a giant outsider, like everyone’s part of this big comedy act that I’m just not understanding.

I feel like almost everyone my age takes the drive out to Birds Hill to listen to music they do not like. I hear people almost every year saying just how much they hate the music lineup, but I still see them posting on the internet about how much they love Folk Fest.

In my opinion, this year’s lineup was closer to Folk Fest’s roots with performers such as Blue Moon Marquee, Peach Pit, Fred Penner and Kevin Morby. However, a lot of people seemed to dislike the lineup for this year.

Is Folk Fest’s culture really about new and emerging folk artists anymore if people no longer seem to be going for that music? My vendetta against Folk Fest perhaps stems from people going more for the ‘vibe’ more than the music.

While there is nothing fundamentally wrong with going just because your friends are, I feel in my soul that Folk Fest should be more about the music and less about the Instagram pictures.

I am sure one of the big factors in why I tend to avoid Folk Fest is the people I have gone with in years prior. I think because I went with a group of people who were more interested in chugging beer than enjoying the music, I grew to immensely dislike the event itself, which, in all honesty, probably is not fair to Folk Fest at all.

The weekend is probably lovely with the right people, while the sun is shining with music playing softly in the background of your afternoon nap. However, I also feel like Folk Fest is perhaps not as lovely when you’re inhaling smoke the entire weekend and half of Manitoba is burning down.

I think you need a certain attitude when approaching the long weekend of Folk Fest. You have to be okay with being dehydrated, sunburnt and maybe a little bit dusty. Although I could handle all those things, I do not want to have to pay money just to be sunburnt.

Ultimately, I believe Folk Fest is not for everybody. At its core, it is something beautiful and magical, but is often seen as an opportunity to post Instagram photos, rather than to discover and enjoy live music.