I can recall with painful accuracy the hours I spent writing the letters of the alphabet over and over again in first grade. Out of sheer boredom, I turned the B’s into people, adding hair and thick lips. They were kind and chubby and loved to bake cookies for their kids. The P’s were skinny and a little mean, usually wore glasses with thin gold chains, and silently judged all the other letters.

I swear, I created whole universes for those letters to reside.

I wasn’t failing to learn the alphabet. I was trying to survive it.

I did it because I was so devastatingly bored with the process of transcribing them over, and over, and over.

The teachers thought I was insane, or at least inept at both reading and spelling. My mother would wring her hands and ask me when I was going to learn to read and write. I was in the lowest reading group and kept falling asleep, my neck unable to bear the weight of my exhausted, heavy head.

The problem was not my inability to read or write; I could do both just fine. It was the crushing boredom of those repetitive exercises that killed the most important thing in my world both then and now: my imagination. Eventually, a specialist caught on to what I was doing, noticing it wasn’t an inability to write the letter “B,” but rather making that letter into a cartoon out of tedium.

My mother laughed uproariously when she found out, and virtually overnight, I catapulted into the most advanced group in the class.

Language is Not Static

I never stopped writing, but absolutely refused to approach it in any rote manner ever again. Those drills showed me what I inherently knew language was not: static, dull, and banal.

Decades later, I became an English teacher myself and vowed to never subject my students to diagramming sentences, simplistic textual questions rooted purely in recall, or the idea that there is a “correct way” to interpret a poem, prose, story, or any kind of writing, really. All of these practices, to my mind, exist solely for the purpose of destroying a developing mind’s ability to comprehend the inexplicable and profound art of language and words, the indelible aspects of these that make a reader’s skin crawl or tingle, or create a tenderness that forces tears to the surface of eyes.

Plus, on a purely practical note, science has shown that rote memorization, sentence diagramming, and similar practices do not work for teaching and learning grammar. We learn language by using language, by speaking, reading, listening, and writing. This is also how we learn additional languages.

No Need to Throw the Baby Out With the Bathwater

I’m certainly not suggesting we throw entire concepts of grammatical structure or spelling, or any of it, out the window. In fact, I’m suggesting we encourage our kids to read and write and story-tell so much that the rules and logic of the language become a part of who they are, something in their blood.

They need to read things that move them and learn how to find things that do, and we need to encourage them to write about things that they are passionate about, not feed them topics we deem appropriate or important according to our standards or those of society.

One of the sweetest notes a student ever gave me was from a young man years after he was in my AP Language and AP Literature 11th and 12th grade classes. He explained that I was the first teacher he had who let him engage with the readings and material in his own way, because I let him write songs instead of essays.

The thing is, he’s an incredibly gifted musician, and this meant he’d perform for the whole class whenever one was due. It was so win/win and easy to have him follow the AP rubric, give evidence to support the examples he was making to back up his thesis, and quote directly from whatever text we were reading.

The song he wrote about Catcher in the Rye? I still recall the goosebumps the whole class felt when listening to this. Later, this student reflected upon heading into his first year in the “real world” as a full-time musician, and how he can do this because he knows his own, authentic voice. He claimed I, “did what the rarest and best of all teachers do: taught me how to be in dialogue with myself and live in the importance of that space.”

When I read that, of course, I got all weepy and goosebumpy just like when he played his songs for us. He also managed to score a perfect five on the AP language test.

Don’t Read Boring Crap

It’s not rocket science, being a grammar hippie. Voraciously read everything that gives you those goosebumps, or scares you if that’s your bag, or tickles your intellectual fancy. Just read what you love and learn how to find the next thing you will love, and stop reading crap that bores you.

If you’re a teacher, don’t force students to read crap that bores them.

This kills their imagination and their love of reading and, in my opinion, is educationally negligent at best because the loss of that curiosity and spark is devastating. Like, losing a limb devastating.

All this reading of what you love will show you grammar, and it will also show you writers who break grammar beautifully by making their own rules or finding workarounds. This can’t happen, by the way, until you’ve absorbed those rules well enough to understand how and why to break them.

Take both the title of and the extraordinary first line of e.e. cummings’, [i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)

I can still recall when I first read this and other work by cummings. Yeah, I was around thirteen and so excited by the badassery of that insane punctuation, and not capitalizing his name, and all these ways everyone, even teachers, were like, “yeah, you can do all that crazy stuff, we still love you. You can be famous.”

e.e. cummings: the Ultimate Grammar Hippie

The craziest thing about understanding this even way back then is how I knew why everyone allowed him to break all these rules: it worked. Those lines were like a song I couldn’t get out of my head and just so stinking beautiful. You can feel the love dripping off of them and I wanted someone to love me like that, too, and break grammar rules and make up his own, all so he could show me the rhythm of that love. E.e. cummings was the ultimate grammar hippie and helped me understand that’s what I wanted to be, too.

So I became one by studying literature and creative writing at Columbia University and encouraging budding young writers to be grammar hippies by letting them find their voices in whatever way they can. I do that when training teachers now, too, emboldening them to let go of stale practices that encourage conformity and kill creativity and passion. Each of us is a unique reader, so our sources of inspiration will be unique, too. Find your own love of reading and voice, nurture it, and allow your children or students to do the same.

On a final note, as I was writing this article, my husband, who is also a writer, was cracking up the entire time.

“What?” I asked, “You don’t like the whole ‘grammar hippie’ angle?”

“No,” he laughed, “you’re the ultimate grammar hippie. It’s just that it’s easy to be a grammar hippie when you have a live-in editor who spends two hours on one sentence to make sure it’s perfect.”

He’s right, of course. Be a grammar hippie, but also make sure you get one hell of an excellent and brutally honest critique partner.

“I’m done with traditional ways of finding guys. I’m telling you, this is the future of dating.” Jessica’s blue eyes beamed down at me from her six-foot stature in elegant heels.

“Seriously?” My heart raced, which was kind of nice in the bitingly cold East Village wind on that otherwise snowless December night. “Aren’t you a little…,” I searched for the words, recalling not-so-safe moments in my life where dating was far from pleasant, or consensual.

“That’s one of the reasons it’s so brilliant.” Jessica was gorgeous, one of a few actual models I’d grown close to since moving to New York, though she no longer worked as one. I’d somehow landed a spot at Columbia University as an academic underdog from a small New Mexican town with nothing but a GED and some decent writing chops. “You get to drill down to exactly what you’re looking for: education level, types of books he likes, job interests, hobbies, whatever. Plus, you obviously meet in public. It’s way safer than a crowded bar.”

She was right, though this new way of approaching dating seemed so … off, as if for someone who had to hide behind a computer.

But if the “real world” meant a stinky bar filled with cigarette smoke and sketchy predators, didn’t setting up a nice time in a cafe one-on-one make sense?

Jessica wrapped her fur-lined trench tighter around her waist as we reached the club. “You’ll never look back.”

When Jessica, not only stunning and elegant, but summa cum laude due to an innate and bitingly sharp, analytical intelligence, suggested I take the plunge into something as new and unique as online dating, I felt I had little option.

I had to do it.

Nerve was one of the first places that made this kind of negotiation possible. Before apps, before swipe culture, it allowed people to be explicit about what they wanted—and just as importantly, what they didn’t—before ever meeting. For someone who had learned to be vigilant, that clarity felt like safety.

The Date

My fingers tightened on the cold, slick metal of the bar as the E train shook and rumbled towards the stop where I’d meet my first Nerve date.

We were both looking for something unique, bizarre, untenable, and somehow this ended up meaning no words.

Those were the only rules.

No words.

I didn’t know it then, but this was less a date than an experiment in control, silence, and safety.

We’d laid out the specifics: he’d enter the stage at Court Square; we’d both be in the clothes we’d described. We had until Washington Square Park.

If we liked what we saw, we’d stay until that stop and head to the park.

He was tall and thinner than I’d expected, with long, thick hair loose beneath a winter hat. His blue eyes were large and he was unconventionally attractive, the barest hint of a tattoo sneaking up the side of his neck where skin peeked through.

Though he didn’t smile, his eyes didn’t waver as he headed straight for where I stood.

My hand tightened further, palm now slick with my own sweat.

The silence was crushing in that otherwise loud car.

It was the New York time of night on a Saturday where everyone was animated, some already intoxicated, verbose and happy, not yet in the anxious, I’ve-had-too-much and it’s too late anyway part of the night where the pain, loneliness, and isolation of that city seeps through in nighttime pockets.

He stared down, mouth immobile, eyes glued to the outlines of my face, tracing me.

There was freedom in that line we drew, he could stare and stare and no one cared because it was New York and no one cares in New York because we’re all in our own worlds together.

I was barely even nervous, though maybe the excitement mixed with those nerves created that intoxicating, confusing mix of something else, something I had no words for.

Which was fine, because we had no words, those were the rules.

We didn’t have to.

He liked my face; I could see it. He may have loved it.

The admiration made my cheeks burn; eyes fall towards my feet. The cold blasted my bare neck.

Exposed, five stops from Washington Square, my naked neck lay open.

The car grew tighter, squeezing in on itself the way only a New York subway can, bodies cramming closer together.

New York is silent in the extremity of its intimacy.

We learn to give space, thousands of miles of it, though our bodies are, at times, cheek-to-cheek.

We never acknowledge this intimacy because to do so would be a brutal assault, violation of an unspoken pact that we are here, packed together forcibly, but cannot know the feel of the touch that is all around us, all the time, the breath so close it crystallizes our lashes in winter.

No sound was the only rule, so it was not a violation when his fingers gently grazed the smallest hairs at the base of my neck, right beneath where I’d tucked the rest into a clip beneath my hat.

My back became a billion tiny mouths puckering, and the blast of winter from the briefly open door trickled all the way to the bottom of my spine.

His fingers remained there, like that, until the stop where we both got to decide whether to walk to the park or leave.

There was no unspoken question, no hesitation, not even the barest hint of concern for one.

The walk from the station to the park is short, and the sudden, actual distance between bodies, coupled with the frigid cold, the way the air swirled around us like water bubbles in half-frozen cubes of ice, highlighted the emptiness of the space between us.

The fact we’d somehow broken that unspoken bubble of non-intimacy and made it intimate made us children breaking the one New York rule, some firm, non-negotiable one we should feel nothing but shame for leaving behind.

We were in New York, silent, and had touched.

We didn’t hold hands, though when we found the bench beneath the thickest copse of trees between dim streetlamps, we were alone amidst the faint city voices we had chosen not to join, and sat in silence, and did not touch.

Not for a long, long time.

In the fur-lined thickness of my black, thrift-store gloves, my fingers grew numb.

The ghost of that touch still lingered all over my spine, that part of my body behind me, now touching the bench, tingling with a mix of cold and memory.

His eyes met mine and there was nothing romantic, no longing for something either of us wanted or needed that could have come from Nerve or any other dating site, but we’d opened this portal neither of us had realized existed until that experiment.

We thought it was sexual, but it wasn’t.

It was about New York, touch, space, and sound. We’d blocked out the noise, welcomed the silence, and enveloped ourselves in a different kind of bubble.

He leaned in and enveloped me. His arms were long and strong, and he was much larger than me. For a moment, I was warmer, and he tightened the embrace.

We held each other, my face moving towards his not for a kiss but the barest hint of skin, of cheek-to-cheek.

His grew warm, a little wet.

He cried, silently, his body immobile.

I had no idea why, but I couldn’t break the agreement, so instead stayed in that embrace, in that temporary warmth, as tears slid soundlessly down his face.

He pushed my body away, gently, then. Soundless, he mouthed the word, “go,” and I did.

I never saw him or wrote to him again. I didn’t even look at his profile. Our experiment was over, complete, and perfect.

I went on a few more Nerve dates, but nothing stuck, though Jessica ended up marrying one of hers, and we all grew into this new form of meeting one another, of knowing people virtually or testing ourselves and our understanding of the world in different ways through this new, insurmountable hyper-reality of the internet.

I am the kind of tired brought on by the malaise of teenaged boredom and afternoon height of midsummer heat, even though it never really gets that hot in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I live with my mother and brother in an old adobe in the early nineties. I am twelve, have nowhere to go and nothing to do, so I lie here, waiting for something to happen.

Like the days I spend hours reading fantasy novels beneath locust trees, images begin to swirl — memories and haphazard wants and dreams, hopes for something I might later call a future, and the more frightening blobs I’ve started to recognize, recently, as memories. Though only twelve, I’ve already lived in Lagos, Nigeria; Skibbereen, Ireland; Denton, Texas; Mahopac, New York; Tesuque, New Mexico; and now Santa Fe.

Those years held the bitter divorce of my parents between Lagos and Skibbereen, where my mother fled. She would later relay to me stories of her madness, something she called post-partum depression, alongside cerebral malaria that plagued her to the point we feared for our safety. We lived in an old farmhouse dubbed, in Gaelic, “Beautiful Fairy Fort,” and my grandmother, a tall, quiet woman of French-German descent, traveled to rescue us. She brought us back to where she and my grandfather lived in Denton, Texas.

My mother has shown my brother and me pictures of these times, moments locked behind screens whose color has faded to the point I wonder if everything looked like that in the seventies, muted and dark, or if perhaps it’s Ireland, and that’s why the words and poetry from that place drip with melancholy and longing. She has shown photographs of us as small children in Nigeria, by streams and with our nanny, who she tells us raised us while she and my Psychologist-father held parties for the likes of Fela Kuti and other musicians and artists of the Lagos arts-renaissance.

These photographs, I realize as I lie in my bed in Santa Fe, are not actual memories, though I have constructed memories around them. There are spaces between the images, too, dark voids that open gaping mouths threatening to consume me whole if I spend too long staring.

We are the survivors that have lived through these stories. We have emerged, and we are still alive.

In these voids, terrible things live, moments where the madness my mother describes took on real form, when she’d run screaming through the house, tearing at her literal hair until blood dotted the tips of her fingers, which she’d show us before screaming more, in the kitchen, where she could break glasses and delicate teacups.

This happened.
This happened.
This happened.

I don’t know why, but right now, in my bed in Santa Fe, I refuse to look away from that blackness, and these words form.

This happened.
This happened.
This happened.

They are like the words I recall feeling as a child, rather than thinking, words that rushed through me, telling me, “I am me, I am me, I am me.” This is a real memory, the moment I saw myself as unique and separate from anyone else. But these new words, this new awareness is different. The mantra, this happened, hammers at my consciousness; it’s sticky and thick and heavy, but I can’t stop the focus. I have to know more. I have to know all of it, every memory, everything real. The memories of my mother, those that showed me exactly what her madness looked like, what it felt like to witness it at the age of six, or seven, or eight, are real.

I swallow hard, the saliva acidic against the back of my throat, but don’t open my eyes. I have to go deeper. I have to know. I don’t know why, but I do. It’s like opening the most important gift or reading until the very end of a book and refusing to skip ahead, no matter how much you want to know the resolution right now. If I look ahead, the images themselves might leave forever, as fleeting as they are, as insubstantial. They are mist, these memories, timeless and horrible, but also as delicate and perfect as the fairies I used to imagine residing unseen in our Beautiful Fairy Fort.

That happened. The recognition of this is electric — like a thousand, a billion tiny pinpricks of light zapping me everywhere, in the most intimate parts. This happened. It was real, substantive, not a dream; this is the life I have lived and haven’t seen. Something’s been pushing at me, gentle and insidious, covering these memories with black blankets, placing a finger to its lips, and emitting a hushhhhhhh like wind across a thousand miles of tall grass, which in turn sways away from me, further clouding my senses with the rustle and reddish light beating across the tips.

This happened, and what else? What else has some tiny gnome in my mind been covering up? Why is it I have always walked forward, and never thought to look back, to wonder about the source of this pain I carry with me all the time? The source is in that blackness, I know it. It’s in memories I have to keep probing, or I will become like her, like my mother, and scream endlessly and futilely into that void, shatter glass, and threaten suicide and death to my children because I can’t see, because I refuse to look.

This happened.
This happened.
This happened.

It wasn’t that long ago, really, when something beyond terrible happened.

I see the bike lying against a garage door in the hot Texas sun. It’s my best friend’s house, Jennifer. Her hair is dark like mine, but her eyes are brown instead of blue, cheeks round and red. We are five, or six, or seven. I push aside the thought of age, of that kind of specificity. I know, somehow, I will never grasp that. Instead, I see Jennifer and her tall brother, an adult, in her kitchen in the house next to ours in Denton.

All of this happened. Jennifer was a real girl, I recall pictures of her from our albums, and her brother is too crisp in my mind, his words so precise, almost categorical.

“If you do it,” he says, “you guys can have an ice cream bar.”

We don’t have desserts in my house, not really. My mother always insists on healthy food, so this is tempting. Not tempting enough to go through with what he’s asking, though. I don’t know how I know what he’s asking for, but I know it’s a horrible thing, the worst kind of horrible thing.

His face drops, and Jennifer shoots me a glance.

This happened.

“Okay then, how about a sleepover?” He brightens.

I’ve never had a sleepover. My child-belly does flip-flops, and it’s like I’ve been offered the actual moon, a space journey with astronauts, and maybe fairies. Jennifer’s face looks scared, but she wants this, too. We could play all night, and I could sleep in a bag beneath her bed.

I agree, and Jennifer’s brother claps his hands as if he were the child. Then, he takes me into the bathroom where he removes my overalls, pulls his pants down, places Vaseline on his hands, and begins to rub.

This happened.

In Santa Fe, I cannot believe what I am re-seeing, what I am re-experiencing.

It is horrible, but elating, shocking in the life it brings. I’m alive. This numbness I carry all the time, in my fingers and toes, begins to dissipate. The room spins as the images pummel. I feel sick, stand up, and go to the bathroom where I lean over the toilet and vomit. The images don’t stop, they are a barrage, like the finale of a fireworks show, exploding with color and texture and sound, and they are too much.

And they are not enough. They continue to flood.

They flood me with what happened next, with the unthinkable, and they flood me with Jennifer’s soft voice from the other side of the bathroom door, asking when we would be finished. Her brother whispers to tell her that he’s helping me pull up my pants. I obey. She asks again, more insistent, telling him mom and dad will be home soon, and he is angry, but listens. He lets me go, and I re-join Jennifer, scared and confused, and this has happened before.

The strangest part of this is the memory within this new memory — this concrete knowledge, this is not the first time he has done this. But that one, or those, the deeper ones, are in a box so old and locked so tightly, I’m not sure there ever was a key.

Jennifer and I go to her room, back to playing with Barbies. Her room is messier than mine because there are toys everywhere. We are less engaged now, quieter, both of us carrying this sick, heavy thing we don’t understand. Finally, she looks up. “What did he do?” she asks.

I lean in a little. I’m telling her a secret. “It,” I whisper.

Her lids fall, and her cheeks redden. I think she is crying. “He shouldn’t do it,” she whispers back. Then, red eyes meet mine one last time. “He does it to me, too.”

The thing about repressed memory is that you are not whole without these horrible things that are a part of you.

You carry them with you, but they are shaded and hidden and still so terribly heavy. You are not free of them; they control every aspect of you on some deep, profound level. They are fear and pain and self-destruction, self-loathing and chaos because you cannot see them, but they see the deepest, most private parts of you. They control you, it seems, like an android instructed by some outside, malevolent force. You are not you, you are never you, you can’t be you, because you are not whole. These pieces are black holes, and eventually consume other parts of you, parts that would otherwise help you understand yourself.

Profound trauma causes this, and those who have experienced it have to either carry around this blackness, this absence, or let it resurface and see it too clearly, allow the core of ourselves to be pummeled by it because this happened, and when we reenter memory, we reenter what we have actually experienced.

Doing so means asking awful questions, like “Why did I let this happen?” It means feeling flawed, broken, dirty, soiled. Reentry into memory means confronting things we sometimes mistake for who we are, fundamentally, rather than what we have experienced. We cannot separate these things until we see these memories as clearly as the lines in our palms.

Reentry into memory also means we can separate two truths. We can begin the arduous process of recognizing that we can be whole, alive, aware, functioning, while still seeing our experiences as part of our lives. These experiences, these horrible traumas, are not us, but our memories, our stories. They are in the past. Reentry into memory allows us to see this, see our stories, and understand they are what we have been through, but we are much more than the stories that shape us.

We are the survivors who have lived through these stories. We have emerged, and we are still alive.

“Seriously?”

The guy grinned beneath the kind of ironic mustache that showed up everywhere in Williamsburg bars in the early two-thousands.

“Yep,” I said. “One drink for each of my friends—if the reading’s accurate.”

I’d been doing tarot readings in coffee shops, bars, and at parties since I was twelve, long before Brooklyn, back when I bought my first deck at a new age shop in my hometown of Santa Fe. In those days, it mostly functioned as a party trick and a reliable way to get free drinks (alcoholic or otherwise).

But here’s the thing I never hide, tarot doesn’t work because it’s mystical, but because humans are astonishingly good at finding truth when they’re given symbols instead of instructions.

Just like every other time I’d done this, often late into the night and the earliest hours of the morning, the hipster bought me and my three friends not one, but multiple drinks.

“Dude,” he said after hearing his reading and listening in on his girlfriend’s. “You are spot on.”

“Creepy,” the girl chimed. “Really, really freaky.”

Tarot functions like a Rorschach test. Each card contains an archetype; images and narratives that humans have carried for centuries. When people encounter these images, they project meaning onto them. That projection is experienced as insight because the meaning arises internally, rather than because the cards themselves provide answers. The reader’s role is to guide attention, help someone work from the inside out rather than impose anything on them.

The ancestors of what we now refer to as “tarot” cards date back earlier than when Jung defined the term “archetype forms” in 1919; the cards themselves date as early as the fourteenth century in Italy. While tarot was used as a sort of parlor game, quite similar to what I was doing in pubs in Brooklyn, it wasn’t until the sixteenth or seventeenth century that it began to be used for divination.

Long before Jung defined archetypes in 1919, tarot imagery had existed for centuries, as early as fourteenth century Italy. Humans encode images far faster than words, and it stands to reason that shared symbolic imagery passed through generations can unlock meaning more efficiently than direct instruction ever could.

I realize I’m showing you the card up my sleeve, the card up most good tarot readers’ sleeves, really, but that shouldn’t make it any less mystical. Time and time again in those various parties and drinking establishments, I found myself before someone pouring their heart out, sobbing about things that truly matter, things triggered by the combination of archetypal images in the cards and the fact that my primary goal in reading their tarot, ultimately in reading them as a human being, was to listen.

The art of reading tarot, to my mind and in those experiences, was about helping people unlock things they are trying to hide within themselves. It doesn’t take much, even when the card is ostensibly “bad” like, for example, this card:

The Falling Tower represents obliteration, annihilation, utter destruction (check out those people jumping out of flaming windows, looks dire). When someone pulls a card like that, or the Death card, they kinda freak out, understandably, but after a little conversation and reflection, it often turns out that annihilation is exactly what the person is experiencing and needs to understand.

Ultimately, what tarot cards and tarot card readings can teach us about humanity is that we are all deeply susceptible to archetypal images and can use this to scratch the surface using our greatest teachers: ourselves. We know ourselves more intimately than anyone else, and a little archetypal Rorschach can nudge us towards self-understanding.

Learning to read tarot is deeply meaningful, and I highly recommend it for diving into and strengthening both your inherent emotional intelligence and active listening skills. The real mystical stuff lies in our own unique ability to know ourselves and learn to help others find this, too.

Tarot reveals attention, regardless of how it’s portrayed, gives people a language for what they already sense but haven’t yet articulated. The insight comes from the moment when someone realizes they’ve been telling their own story all along. The cards themselves are just a vessel for this story, rather than a container.

Humans have always used symbols to think, grieve, decide, and confess, whether they believe in them or not. Tarot simply makes that process visible, and once we understand this, the mysticism fades, leaving the meaning raw, intact, and clear.

At seventeen, I traveled to Harare, Zimbabwe, to meet my father for the first time. The literal truth is I’d seen him before, as a baby, when our family lived in Lagos, Nigeria, where he worked as a professor of Psychology. He and my mother lived there together for, as she puts it, “ten good years.” The “good” she references is usually the place itself. Having come from small-town Indiana, those ten years gave her life a focus and meaning it had previously lacked, one rooted in the art there, about which she’d eventually become an expert.

For her, there was no “good” in my father or their relationship, though I suspect the lack of this word in her recollection has far more to do with the pain of what she experienced as too much “good.” She loved him. She confessed this to me once, shortly before I boarded the plane to Harare.

“He was the love of my life,” she said, green eyes wistful in that way I’d previously only seen brought on by too many glasses of afternoon wine. But even those words carried accusation: he took that from her, himself, the love of her life. He abandoned her. He abandoned all of us.

My mother can be a difficult person. I left the house at seventeen, shortly after the Zimbabwe trip, in part because of this. She flies into rages, often rooted in perceptions about her own past as if the people before her were the embodiment of her pain, the cause of everything that’s gone wrong. Unfortunately, the people in front of her, for too long, were her own children. I suspect these rages may have happened with my father, too, and this may have had something to do with his departure.

I can’t be sure, though. My father had six wives, spanning the globe, with eight biological and numerous adopted children scattered among them. I’ve met most of them, though I have yet to meet two of my half-brothers or any of the adopted children.

Though he was born in Kent, England, my father’s first wife was South African, and from her came my first two brothers. A few years ago, I met one in Tasmania, Australia, where he is a father himself to three children, with numerous grandchildren. The whole family welcomed me with open arms.

One evening, when walking his dog along a pristine beach overlooking the startlingly picturesque city of Hobart, he turned to me. “I want to thank you for coming all this way,” he said. This brother, my eldest, is soft-spoken, with a long white beard and gentle eyes. “I wouldn’t have,” he added.

His sincerity and gratitude rocked me. He had been raised by a step-father, had that presence in his life, and did not appear to have the gaping hole I carry with me, the absence, this itch of guilt, shame, and longing. He doesn’t need to seek out our siblings in the hope of somehow filling this void.

He loved having a sister, though, something he also shared with me. Hearing this, meeting his family, my nieces, and nephews, and their children, made traveling across the globe worth it. It didn’t fill that father-shaped hole but created something else, a deeper connection to a family I otherwise would not understand.

The other brother, the Tasmanian’s full sibling, lives in Johannesburg. On that same trip, I met his son, my nephew, in his home in Auckland, New Zealand, and one day I hope this expands to the rest of that family.

My father’s second wife was also South African, and from her, he gained two more sons, one who now lives in London, the other in St. Kitts, in the Caribbean. The first son from this marriage, I met when I was a teenager living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My mother had maintained a friendship with him, and he came to stay with us for some time. My full brother was ecstatic, and though our South African sibling was quite older, a clear alcoholic with addiction issues abound, he was also very loving, a startlingly talented artist, and illustrated in a human way that we did have a father out there, somewhere. To this day, when I visit London, I stay with this brother, and consider him the closest sibling beside my full brother, who grew up in the same fatherless void as me.

I have yet to meet the Caribbean brother, though we met virtually over lockdown on Skype.

In the birth and abandonment lineup, my full brother and I came next. My mother was my father’s fourth wife, his third another South African, who died childlessly.

I don’t know what happened during that decade in Lagos, though I carry hazy memories of large, colorful lizards, gritty rivers, and a Nigerian nanny who looked after my full brother and me. There was pain, I’m sure, but also life: my mother was a talented artist. My parents hosted large parties filled with creatives that even included Fela Kuti and other famous musicians.

They divorced, and we moved to the States. Once, my father sent a package with some books and a letter for my brother and me. If there were other attempts at communication, these were not shared with us. “A child’s place is with the mother,” he’d said, according to my mother. I believe this, in part because of the strange use of “the” in this sentence, as if all women fit into this archetype and all children beneath the umbrella of the term.

I often wonder what he thought of the father archetype, or if there was one for him. These thoughts lead me down a rabbit hole of guilt for wanting one, for the idea of “father” ever being important. It’s something I should be able to transcend, let go of, something unimportant and minuscule. My desire for one, the ache, that burning longing, is a childish, embarrassing thing.

After my full brother and I came two more children, another boy who now lives in London, and a girl who questions whether she is actually my father’s bio-child. They came from the fifth wife, a Nigerian woman now living in London, where her two children also reside. As an adult, I met this brother and sister in London on yet another trip while in college.

“Were you surprised,” asked my sister, “when I came out black?” She’s very dark, my sister, though her full brother has the coffee complexion of most mixed-race children.

It touched me, that she thought I’d have any opinion one way or another, since I was only three or four when we left and didn’t even know she existed until much, much later. But meeting her, along with all my other brothers, expanded my heart to a capacity I didn’t know I was capable of. It didn’t even touch the father-void but created this new space, something less alone, where my place in the universe holds others like me. Especially her, a girl too, regardless of our differences — one her friends laughed at and teased her about when we introduced ourselves as sisters.

These people, these adults abandoned as children in different ways, at different ages, in different places, each held something for me. This is still difficult to reconcile with the times I met my father before his death: in Harare, then after the decline of Zimbabwe in the outskirts of Durban, South Africa, where he lived with his sixth and final wife, with whom he had no children. After this, I met him again in Manchester, where Alzheimer’s had taken hold, and he was no longer verbal. I brought my daughter to meet her grandfather, though she was only nine months old at the time. One of my brothers, the one from the fifth wife, brought his son, and the cousins met across continents, time, and possibility.

When he died, I received an email from one of the South African brothers, wife two, child three, the one with whom I’m closest. “Daddy died this day,” it read.

I was in a meeting at my work for a large school district in Boise, Idaho, where I work with children and families learning English, coming from all over the world, much like the family I have scattered across the globe. My throat constricted, gag reflex threatening.

I held back all emotion, something I’d trained my heart and body to do since childhood. When the meeting closed, I asked a colleague to explain the situation to my superior. I couldn’t speak it myself.

“My father died,” I said. “I can’t talk about it. I feel guilty for mourning it. I’ve only met him a few times. I’m really sorry, but I have to go home for a bit.”

She relayed the information, word for word, even though, in retrospect, I see the profound grief and pain in my inability to allow myself one day of sadness to mourn the loss not only of his life, but that emptiness, the void of his existence, and what that brought me and all these other lives, all over the globe.

Editor’s note / Afterword

This essay is part of a larger body of work I’m building about the intersections of growth, absence, and resilience, how people learn to thrive inside loss. Much of my writing begins in education, but ends in the same place: how humans adapt, connect, and survive without breaking.

If you’re here because you care about learning, family, loss, or the work of making meaning out of fractured histories, you’re in the right place.

This essay was first written several years ago and revisited here, unchanged, because time has not softened its questions.

Ten years ago, I moved seven thousand miles from my home in Abuja, Nigeria, to live in Garden City, Idaho, with a man I’d fallen in love with through writing.

Though the lead-up to this move was mired in conflict and trauma so deep, I am still reeling from the aftermath of much of it; the move and the man were not a mistake.

Even if it had been, I would have learned from it. Grown. That belief—that growth does not require breaking—has shaped nearly everything I’ve done since.

For almost thirty years, I’ve worked in and around learning: teaching writing and photography, designing curriculum, supporting educators, and helping students navigate academic, linguistic, and emotional systems. Across all of it, one principle has held steady: people grow best when they are stretched thoughtfully, not brutally.

This space is for people who think seriously about growth—in classrooms, in systems, and in their own lives—and who are no longer convinced that suffering is the price of excellence. It’s for those who’ve crossed something—geography, profession, love, trauma—and now ask not whether growth is possible, but how to grow without breaking.

Over time, I’ve come to understand three things about learning, resilience, and survival. They are simple. Portable. And they apply far beyond schools.

1. Growth requires clarity, not confusion

When I began teaching in a middle school in Bushwick, Brooklyn in the early 2000s, administrators urged me to write three things on the board every day: a Do Now, a learning aim, and a statement beginning with SWBAT—students will be able to.

“It’s important for the kids,” the dean of students told me during one of his after-school “coaching chats,” feet propped casually on a student desk.

At the time, I didn’t buy it. The phrases felt performative, more for compliance than care. And in many ways, they were; my school was under constant threat of closure, and visibility mattered more than nuance.

But over time, something became clear. When those structures were used well, for orientation rather than compliance, they changed how students entered the room.

On days when I didn’t post an agenda, the first question was always the same: What are we doing today? In the same way children ask What’s for dinner? when they come home.

I learned this question isn’t resistance, but regulation.

Clarity signals safety. When the brain knows what’s coming, it can allocate energy toward thinking rather than scanning for threat. Research on cognitive load confirms this: clear goals, examples, and structure reduce unnecessary mental strain and increase motivation, confidence, and engagement.

Confusion doesn’t make learning harder in a productive way. It just makes it noisier.

2. Rigor is not synonymous with pain.

The same dean who coached me on clarity was also my first exposure to real abuse in an educational setting.

During my prep periods, I often worked in makeshift “timeout” rooms—spaces where disruptive students were sent. Within weeks, I began to hear screaming echo down the hallway. At first, I assumed it was a student.

It wasn’t. It was the dean.

You’re pathetic. You have no idea how to push yourself.

You’ll never amount to anything, anything. You don’t even try.

You’re a piece of shit. You’ll always be a piece of shit.

I was twenty-three and didn’t yet understand my own agency, didn’t know that adults could—and should—interrupt other adults. I froze, wondering what this was supposed to accomplish.

One day, my mentor, a sweet, middle-aged lady from Jersey with the accent to prove it, sat with me, lesson planning. The Dean began one of his tirades, and she pressed her lips into a thin, dewy pink line. “Is he always like that?”

I nodded.

She shook her head. “He shouldn’t talk to them like that.” She pronounced the word, “tawk,” and I opened my mouth, wanting to ask her what we could do about it.

Before I could say anything, she returned to our planning. “Now, stickers,” she urged. “Those are motivational.”

My mentor never said anything to anyone about Dean, though I asked pretty much everyone I could about why he was allowed to verbally abuse those kids, why no one intervened. “This is a rough school,” most would say, shrugging their shoulders. “The kids are tough.”

Later, I noticed something else: the most orderly, engaged classrooms didn’t belong to the teachers who yelled. They belonged to teachers who held high standards without contempt. Teachers who believed deeply that students were capable. It was the teachers who pushed the kids to the highest of their abilities, with kindness often hidden behind stern faces, the ones who called parents and called out behaviors in their own classes without resorting to the Dean to “deal” with the issues for them.

In other words, it was the most rigorous teachers with the classrooms that functioned the finest. Those who held high standards for the kids because deep down, intrinsically, they genuinely believed the students could meet them.

Rigor isn’t pain but promise. This can, and should, be translated into any area of life.

Resilience is not about hardening

We often confuse resilience with toughness: bracing, enduring, pushing through. But resilience isn’t built by breaking people down, but when a challenge is survivable, meaningful, and paired with enough safety to try again.

Education theory calls this the zone of proximal development, the space between what someone can do easily and what’s so difficult it triggers anxiety and shutdown. Neuroscience echoes this, that the brain learns best when it feels challenged and safe. Resilience isn’t forged by throwing people into the deep end. It’s built by staying close enough to the edge to feel the water — and knowing someone will pull you back if needed.

When we harden, brace against, we are not learning, adapting, or growing. We are shielding ourselves from a perceived onslaught, often with shields so large as to obscure the very thing we were hoping to see. Resilience doesn’t require compliance, but rather, a sense of meaning.

Research has shown that environments that emphasize purpose, coherence, and agency foster durable resilience. When we understand why we’re doing or learning a task, concept, or skill, are clear about what it entails, and know the relevance behind it, we are eager to accept the challenge because it doesn’t just feed, it nourishes.

One of the most misunderstood findings in resilience research is that recovery is the opposite of rigor. When we picture someone being lazy, we imagine them on a couch or bed, scrolling mindlessly or binge-watching Friends.

But recovery is not the opposite of rigor; it is foundational to it. Sleep, reflection, and downtime are when the brain integrates new learning. So, when we offer up “Fun Fridays” for our students, or movie time after reading a seminal novel, or even a simpler Socratic Seminar topic, “Cake vs. Pie,” for example, we cultivate rigor and support resilience.

Same thing goes for that “Succession” marathon or rainy weekend holed up in the house baking cookies in unwashed pajamas. There is no shame in any of this, but growth and expansion.

What this leaves us with

Growth without breaking isn’t soft. It’s precise, asks for clarity instead of confusion, challenge instead of punishment, and recovery instead of collapse.

This applies to classrooms, certainly, but also relationships, careers, healing, and the long work of becoming whole.

Rigor isn’t pain, but promise, and resilience isn’t hardening, but adaptation. Growth, when done well, doesn’t leave us smaller or scarred, but more ourselves.

That’s the work I’m interested in exploring here.