I had a teacher my freshman year of high school that told me I should abandon any and all hopes of ever being a writer.
“Some people can write, some cannot,” she said, and told me that pretending otherwise would be an unfair joke. She taught my Honors English I class, and also happened to be my Homeroom teacher, so I had to see her twice a day, every day, the whole year.
I am lucky, I suppose, in that I was not, and am not still, the kind of person who holds opinions like these at all dear. My autism insulates me from embarrassment, but whilst doing so, it also insulates me from adding any weight or gravity to the way I might be perceived. I know, and have known all the time I’ve been on this strange earth, precisely who I am, what I stand for, and where the boundaries of my interests, my talents (or lack thereof), my curiosities, and yes, my dreams, exist.
Still though, her words were angry words, they were needlessly cruel, and I remember at the time thinking how glad I was they were aimed at me and not someone without the bizarre and unfair advantages my brain granted me—undiagnosed at the time, but still keenly aware. If ever there were an opposite, an antithesis to the Keating of Dead Poets Society, it was she.
Those Who Saw Me
More though, I remember two other teachers that went another way.
I remember two who embodied all Robin Williams’ Keating stood for in the film that inspired this four-part saga through September. I remember Mr. Wirak, and I remember Mr. Proctor, and I remember how they changed my life.
Mr. Wirak was my 4th grade teacher at Jefferson Elementary School here in Helena, Montana, and he was the epitome of cool. He said rad, talked like a surfer who smoked too many cigarettes when he was younger, and wore a collection of crazy ties and long coats. He walked with a looping gait, encouraged debate and argument even in 4th grade, and capped off every day with a game of Trash Can P-I-G for one student each day. Winner got respect. He was the first who taught me to think so far outside the box, the box kind of ceased to exist at all. He made learning an adventure, and was the first to truly stoke the flame of curiosity that, until that point, had always been forced to stay small and smoldering little embers by other teachers who didn’t know how to handle my over-abundance of passion.
Mr. Proctor came next, a cyclocross bike racer who spent years traveling the globe and working on small farms after he graduated college. Who had stories of living in places like Austria and Switzerland, told tales of far-off countries and instead of simply making us read To Kill A Mockingbird, he asked us to adapt it into our own version of a screenplay. Pick a scene he said, make it a movie.
We wrote more in his class than any I’d ever had before it. Instead of forced absorption of words written by other authors from other times, we were told to become the writers instead. Our words, which meant so much more work for him, but our chance to show the way we could make letters dance with letters to form what we hoped were beautiful waltzing words across the white pages we pulled from our Word Processors, those relics that filled a temporary gap between typewriter and a shiny real computer most of us still didn’t have.
I still have my essays from him, I still have the notes. More than this, I have the memory of him being the very first person to tell me I could, and should, write.
To Awaken What Slumbers
It’s gratitude now, more than anything else.
It’s feeling thankful not just for Proctor and Wirak, but for that Freshman Honors English I teacher (who shall not be named) who told me I should not dream the dreams I dreamed, but aim lower. Aim elsewhere.
Some awake what slumbers within you by gently stirring your shoulders, by whispering tender encouragement while you stay dreaming. Some shout, and scream, and pull the covers off so the first chill of morning can shock you into standing.
Both work, but only one keeps you warm.
As the first true month of back-to-school has crested at its midpoint and is already careening towards ending, I sit and look off my deck, and I am taken back to each new beginning from Kindergarten through graduation from college 16 or so years later. The school supplies, the backpack filled, the brown bag lunch carried as I could not stomach the cafeteria lunches.
I type these words and think of all you who will read them, and stare at the blinking cursor in disbelief that after all that has come, gone, transformed, and occurred, somehow the dream I was told as a freshman to abandon, has come true.
I am a writer.
What a gift to awaken what slumbers in the soul of another. What a gift to be a teacher, a mentor, an artist, hell, a ghost, to someone else. To shape them, to allow them to dream, and believe that one day they might reach them.
What a gift to show others the way to see the world in a brand new way, to dare, to chance, to stand upon the desks and shout O CAPTAIN MY CAPTAIN into the ether and angst that defines so much of the start of our lifetimes.
I was gifted many of these, some in school, some on the baseball diamonds I grew up haunting, some as authors, some as artists, some as Buddhas, beat poets, or best friends.
I tried too to BE this for those who came to me.
This is the lesson I think Wirak and Proctor, Whitman and Kerouac, Basquiat and Buddha all were trying to impart, whether they knew it or not. That I could be what some might not have ever had, that we all can.
That the way we live can inspire others to do the same. To stand up, to change, to grow.
Keating told us the Dead Poets still speak to us. They always will. I just keep trying to listen, to live in a way that will maybe one day encourage others to do the same. It’s all I can do, in the end.
Take the lessons I was so lucky to be taught, and try to teach them again to someone new.
To listen to the dreams someone else is dreaming, and instead of trying to squash it into submission, give it the belief to grow.
I love you all.
Be good.
Be who you needed,
awake all that is sleeping.
It will set them free.
