The Stories I’ll Never Tell

In a little less than two weeks, I’ll walk out of my school for the last time. After eight years, I’m moving on from the therapeutic school where I’ve worked as a teacher and leader. I’m happy with my decision and excited about the projects and adventures ahead of me – but I’m also deeply sad to leave the community that’s been my home for the better part of a decade.

It’s a funny thing to try to write about my experiences from this school. Because it’s a therapeutic school that provides counseling as well as education, we’re covered not only by educational privacy law and ethics, but also by health care law and ethics. Even if I weren’t bound by law, I’d still want to respect that the depth of counseling we do requires the trust of a confidential space. So while I can and do write a lot about the strategies, tools and stances of our teachers, I write very little about specific students. When I do, it’s only in the broadest of terms. But the true depth of my work has been in getting to know these complicated, amazing humans and maintaining solid connections through all the ups and downs. This means that the most impactful work I’ve experienced is work I can’t really write about, at least not in a meaningful way. Without the context and specifics of each student, the stories are just sketches.

There are so many stories I’ll never tell: stories about children who have experienced more than most adults do in a lifetime, stories about teens who have everything in the world working against them. The deck is stacked against them when we meet and then something comes along and shreds every last one of the cards and throws it in their faces. The stories of these teens are always about resilience. They are about the depth of human suffering and the unimaginable strength it takes to change. They are stories about sharing the lowest moments and the most fantastic victories.

My stories are about building deep relationship with kids who really had no reason to trust me at all, and stories about how hard we both worked to build and sustain that relationship. There are a lot of tears in my stories. There’s a lot of swearing. There’s a lot of late nights not sleeping and wondering if my students hated me, if I could serve my students, if my students were going to be okay, if my students were at home sleeping or if they were missing or if they were alive.

Mostly the stories I’ll never tell are about hope. They’re about how sparkly and wonderful and brilliant and driven every single one of my students has been – even (especially) the ones who came to our school after another adult at another school said some version of “this kid can’t/won’t/doesn’t want to learn.” The stories are filled with parents who do the impossible every day for their kids even when they’re barely hanging on themselves.And my stories are filled with the giant beating hearts of teachers who dig deep within their souls and find the bravery to be the people our students need.

I won’t ever tell the full stories, the real stories about the past eight years. But I’ll keep writing about what I can in the way I can, and finding ways to talk about the themes and the lessons and the common experiences that transcend the specific and confidential details. And I am so comforted to know that long after I step away from that community, these beautiful stories will continue to unfold: in shouts across the parking lot basketball court; in songs sung along to the radio in cars on the way to internships; in whispers sitting on the floor in the hallway; between tears on the hardest day; between full-belly laughs on the best days.

In my next steps professionally, I’m going to be focusing on helping other teachers work through the challenges with challenging students. I’m doing this because I know that when you persist through the layers of frustration, when you can make it past all the roadblocks and the assumptions and the baggage, you can get to the other side and see into the shining heart of a kid, and see your own humanity reflected back to you. I want every teacher to carry around that story they can never fully explain, because the experience is too complicated for words. It can only be told to ourselves, over and over as we reflect back on what it means to work with complex and whole people. It can only be felt in the bones of a teacher.

So I have stories I’ll never tell – and I hope you do too.