In my last year of high school before I switched to attending virtual school full time, I was called into the counselor’s office after confiding in a teacher that I was struggling with self-harm and suicidal tendencies in part due to the unhealthy environment of the school that I was attending at the time. As he sought to comfort me, he told me, among other things, that I needed to be honest with the people in my life about what I was struggling with.

So, based on what I remember, he told the school counselor (I think maybe she was just the counselor for my grade) what I had told him and my mom was called to the school.

I don’t remember much of the counselor’s response to all these things aside from her stressing to my mother that the school had deemed it mandatory for me to be taken to a therapist, I believe, due to the fact that I was harming myself. One thing I do remember is her, at some point, making the comment to me (in front of my mother) that, in summary, “Sometimes things aren’t always the way we remember them”. This was said in relation to the things I had stated were affecting my mental health so negatively. Among these were the constant racism and bullying I was experiencing at this school.

Whatever her reason for making that statement, it felt (and was) deeply invalidating. But…you know what? As I’ve grown older, I’ve found that she was right. Sometimes things aren’t always the way we remember them. Sometimes…they’re actually worse. As I have gotten older and grown more and as much of the pollution that clouded my life and the relationships in it for so long has cleared, I have started to remember so much more about that time in my life along with other periods of my life.

What I spoke with that teacher about wasn’t even half of what I was subjected to at that terrible, TERRIBLE school. But I remember it now. And these things I never want to forget again.