I know.
I have been told. Not always in those words, but in the pause before them, in the slight tilt of the head that means you are going to get hurt, and I cannot protect you from yourself.
I care too much.
I care about the student at 11 at night who is falling apart, found my email address, and took a chance.
I care about the one who sits in the back row and has stopped submitting work, and I can see it, the withdrawal, the slow disappearance of a person deciding they are not worth the effort of continuing, and I cannot leave that alone. I was never able to leave that alone.
I care about doing it right.
Not right as in perfect. Right as in honest. Right as in the kind of teaching that does not just transfer information but actually touches the place in a person where they decide what they believe about themselves.
I care about the work the way some people care about cathedrals, the way some people will drive a hundred miles to stand in a specific light because beauty matters and attention to beauty is its own form of devotion.
That is what I bring to a classroom. That is what I always brought.
And yes, it has cost me.
It has cost me sleep, health, and the kind of detachment that would have made all of this so much easier to survive.
Detachment would have been armour. I never learned to wear it. I kept choosing the students over the self-protection, kept choosing the honest answer over the comfortable one, kept choosing to actually show up in the full sense of that phrase, present, awake, invested, mine on the table.
They called it inspiring. They called it a gift.
They also did not hire me.
And I have wondered, in the long nights, in the parking lot minutes, in the spaces between what I give and what comes back,
whether caring this much was a kind of wound I kept reopening, whether I should have learned the professional distance they teach you not in any course but in the accumulated silences of rooms that do not warm to you.
But I could not. I genuinely could not.
Because the moment I stop caring is the moment I become something I do not recognize, something that can sit across from a person in the most important years of their life and not feel the weight of that.
I cannot do it.
I care too much, and it is not a flaw I am willing to correct.
It is the most true thing about me.
It is the part of me that the right institution, the right room, the right people will one day recognize not as excess, not as liability,
but as exactly what they were looking for.
I am still waiting for that room.
I still believe it exists, after all of this.
That is either my greatest strength or my most faithful wound.
Perhaps it is both. Perhaps it has always been both.
Aquí estoy. Con todo mi corazón, todavía. With all my heart, still.
Translation Note: Spanish phrases in this poem were 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.
