What stays with me most is the students and their thoughtfulness. I asked them to write about their lives, and I learned something about them this way. Sometimes it was cheerful or banal. Sometimes it was a chronicle of social suffering. Female students commented that it was exhausting to get stared at at the gym, to dodge harassment on the street, to have to smile at work for eleven hours a day. Genderqueer students described being mocked for their looks. Black students faced persecution for their activism against racism. A poor student wrote that they did not like to go home, because their family already had too many mouths to feed, and every visit was a burden. Another said they usually pretended that their dad had died, when actually he had abandoned his family and was nowhere to be found. And I’m haunted by a young woman who divulged that, after her parents’ divorce, she had chosen to live with her father, only to suffer bitterly from her mother’s absence.
I hope I was good enough to deserve what was shared with me.