I am still here

There are wounds that don't bleed where people can see them. Mine lives in my throat, in my hands, in the way I hesitate before I walk into a room now, wondering who has already decided what I am.

Last year broke something in me. Not because I failed - though there were days I felt like I did - but because I was broken deliberately, by someone who had the power to build me up and chose instead to take me apart.

It started quietly, the way these things do. A difficult year. It was not my best year, it was a year where i was primarily, tired. I was struggling, and I knew it. I said so. And every time I said so, I was mocked. Oh, you're complaining again. As if naming pain is weakness. As if asking for help is an accusation.

Instead, someone decided my struggle was an opportunity. Complaints were collected about me - gathered quietly, from peers, like evidence being built for a case that had already reached its verdict. I was tried without knowing I was on trial. My name was used as a punchline, a piñata. 

My competence was questioned, loudly, in ways designed to make others doubt me too. Does she even know what she's doing? Is she even good? 

When people are vitriolic and uncouth repeatedly, it sinks into your heart. You don't notice it happening. You just wake up one day and find that their voice has moved in, and it speaks in the first person now.

I lost people I thought were safe. I lost the ear of people I trusted. I lost - for a while - my own voice, because everywhere I turned, my expression was taken and twisted. Even my private spaces stopped feeling private. Even grief became gossip.

And then I lost something harder to name: the easy, unselfconscious faith I used to have in myself as a teacher.

I raised my voice at the children last year. I am not proud of that. But I understand it now for what it was - not cruelty, not incompetence, but a person running on empty who had been refused every form of refuelling - by this person and leadership.

I realized soon that this person wanted what I was doing. This person wanted to cut me off. 

An apology came, eventually. Partial. Official. Enough to close a file, not enough to name what was actually done. No apology for the peers turned. No apology for the confidence stolen. No apology for almost making people believe the story she told about me.

I am still angry. I want to say that clearly, without shame. Anger is the appropriate response to injustice. What this person did was a violation, underhanded, bullying, and very uncouth. It means I know what happened was wrong. It means I haven't accepted the verdict. I just accepted the partial apology... on paper.

And I am still here.

That is my protest. That I showed up. That I am showing up again. That somewhere underneath the fear and the exhaustion and the doubt she seeded about me, I know who I am. I know what my best work looks like. I have seen it in students' faces. I have heard it said aloud by people with no reason to lie.

She didn't apologize for nearly ruining my life. Maybe she never will.

But my life is not ruined. It is dented, and grieving, and learning to trust itself again.

And that, in the end, is more than she bargained for.