The thing about grief is that it arrives wearing unexpected clothes.
Sometimes it shows up in the middle of a Tuesday, in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a life that looks, from the outside, like it is still standing.
Mine showed up somewhere between the third rejection and the moment I realized I had been caring for people and institutions that were carefully, professionally, without reciprocating that care.
And here is what makes it so hard to say out loud, what makes it sit so deep inside, in the part of the chest that is not quite the heart but lives next door to it:
I am kind.
I know that about myself the way I know my own handwriting. I have always been kind. Not as a strategy, not as a performance, not as the careful warmth institutions train you to project, but the real kind, the kind that costs something, the kind that sits with people in the difficult places without looking for the exit.
I would do anything for anyone.
That is simply a fact about me That is a fact about me that I have lived out in a thousand quiet ways no one ever put in a file, no one ever counted, no one ever thought to mention in the meeting where they decided I was not quite enough.
And my ethics.
I need to talk about my ethics because they are not a section on a curriculum vitae, they are not a course I took and then put away. They are the architecture of me. They are the reason I have never once let a student fall without trying to catch them, never once used my power carelessly, never once walked out of a classroom without asking myself if I had done right by the people in it.
The thought of causing pain, even accidentally, even at a distance, even to someone who might never know,
it undoes me.
It lives in me for days. It wakes me in the night. It sends me back to the moment of it, turning it over, looking for the place where I could have been better, softer, more careful with the fragile thing.
That is who I am.
That is the person who sat in those rooms and was found not quite right, not quite fit, not quite the shape they were looking for.
And the grief of that, the specific grief of that, is not just about the job, is not just about the title or the permanence or the office with my name on the door.
The grief is this:
I know my own heart. I have always known my own heart. And my heart is good.
Not perfect. Not without error. But good in the deep way, good in the way that has cost me things, that has kept me up at night, that has made me choose integrity in the moments when choosing otherwise would have been so much easier.
And they looked at that heart and said not qualified.
That is the wound that does not close cleanly.
That is the grief that does not have a tidy ending, that does not resolve into wisdom on a schedule, that sits in the deep inside and asks the question I am most afraid of:
If this is not enough, what was any of it for?
An answer has yet to arrive.
I have only the question and the ache of it and the knowledge, stubborn and unshakeable, that my kindness was real, my ethics were real, my care was real,
even when the system looked straight at all of it and looked away.
Translation Note: Where Spanish appears in this collection, it was assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.
