Education saved my life. Simple as that. It was someone’s education who figured out the procedure to correct strabismus, and another surgeon’s education to perform it on me, so that this girl who should have been partially blind can get away with (arguably thick) glasses. It was a pharmacist’s education that condensed iron into a tablet, so I don’t get lightheaded, and a lab technician’s education that found the diminished iron in my blood in the first place. It was an engineer’s education, and then a car manufacturer’s, that designed safer cars so that this former permit holder suffered no more than her dad’s exasperation when his car crashed into the curb. And it was a teacher’s education that brought her into the classroom to my third grade self and, without either of us realizing it at the time, set me on the path of pursuing teaching myself. When I walked into her classroom, I was so shy I had trouble starting conversations. But she pushed me and challenged me not just in my academics, but also in my way of thinking. By the end of that year, I hadn't just learned Math and Science but also how to listen, and how to be heard. To this day, I use what I learned in her classroom to push through challenges and advocate for myself. That’s why I want to get a degree and become a teacher: to help the next generation understand what they've learned within the world's larger context. Chances are these students, once they graduate, won’t be articulating the symbolism of Gatsby’s green light; they will, however, be watching the news, and have to analyze both what’s said and isn’t said to come to a rounded conclusion of what occurred. They might not be crafting classical argument pieces about whether schools should implement an honor code system; they could, however, have to disagree with their parents’ beliefs in a professional and kind yet persuasive manner. They probably won’t devour twenty-five books by the end of the semester to achieve an A; they will, however, be required to consider others’ stories, lifestyles, and dreams--even if they differ from their own. And it’s my hope, like any educator, to have some small part in getting these future students to this point. Education is all around us. The refining and enhancing of a skill set are necessary for society. Education isn’t frivolous, or unnecessarily time-consuming, or brainwashing in disguise; it’s a vital part of life. My life included.

At my writer’s group, you’ll never hear anyone clap after a reading. “Ok gang, find a good place to finish that last sentence,” our leader instructs from his spot in the front. We’re in the basement of the old church, the tables aligned in a rectangle with a few black chairs interspersed behind them. The steady clack of keyboards slowly comes to a pitter as people wrap up the last sentences of the free write prompt. I look down at my own computer, the brightness dimmed as low as possible to prevent anyone from reading over my shoulder. It’s alright, but it’s nothing special. That’s probably one of the reasons why we don’t clap. Clapping is for performances, for rewards, for people who practice hours and hours for their moment. Most of us here will never have a moment. We work just as hard, though, put in hundreds of dollars and thousands of hours, survive our day jobs just to enter our side performance, risk long nights and dozens of people shouting in a thousand ways “you’re not good enough” for the privilege of telling someone we’re writers. People think I'm crazy, but I've always taken that trade off. Our leader glances across the room, taking off his gray beret to run a hand through his hair. “Anyone got anything to share?” Ask a hundred writers why they write, and you’ll get a hundred different responses. I got into it because I needed an escape. Fantasy became my life. The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Golden Compass—I read them all, and dozens more besides. It’s no wonder why the first six novels I wrote followed in their footsteps. Eighth grade changed everything. I had some intense mental health issues that would last the better part of three years, which strangled every part of my life. That made me feel quite isolated, until I found a copy of Caroline Kaufman’s light filters in. I didn’t even really read poetry until that point, but that. Is. Poetry. Though Kaufman’s chapbook talks about dealing with depression, which I don't have, she managed to reach through the gap between my brain and hers and find the words I, someone she would never meet, needed to hear. Soon I found that I could no longer be satisfied with giving people an escape from their lives: I wanted to reach into those issues and help them through. That, I hope, will be my mark as a writer: an authenticity that can’t be denied. Something applause has never grasped. Our leader is still looking around, so I swallow, then raise my hand as if still in school. “I’ll go.” He smiles, giving a slight nod. “Alright Sara; go for it.” I swallow again, give the paragraphs one last run through in my head for any typos, then begin. I stumble over the very words I wrote, but the dialogue rolls off my tongue the way I imagined in my head. I have something here. Maybe not much. Certainly not perfection. But…something. There’s a slight pause when I finish, and I can’t help but grin. We may not have our moment, but we do have this. The snaps start as a soft clicking, then grow louder as more members join. Some snap under the table; some rock their arms into the movement. It swells in the basement of nowhere, from people of whom the world will never know their names. I lean back into the brisk pace of the beat and feel the words breathed into the thrum: we hear you; we are with you; this is our life.

My psychiatrist told me I might gain weight. My psychiatrist told me I was on the lowest dose possible, that the side effects would be minimal. My psychiatrist told me the anti-psychotic couldn’t be worse than the voices inside my head. He never told me about the sleep issues. For three weeks my sophomore year I woke up dead. Sometimes it barely passed for morning by the time I got myself ready, the school bells dipping into lunch. I kept a regular sleep schedule, went to bed earlier, meditated regularly. Nothing helped. I’d sleep for fourteen hours, and still, for the rest of the day my arms would be leaden, the backs of my eyes would throb, and I couldn’t have told you my birthday, much less what we were doing in class. Most mornings I wasn’t up for first block—not because I didn’t want to be, but because try as I might, I couldn’t rise for any number of alarms. Some days I was lucky if I ended up catching the tail end of third period. Everyone thought it was mono, except it was in the thick of COVID and I sure wasn’t stealing kisses or sharing drinks by the water fountain. My parents got me tested; surprise, it wasn’t mono, or COVID, or the flu, or a blood disorder, or any other thing I was swabbed and stabbed for. It was my medication. When I was in eighth grade, the voices came for me. They liked to take on the tones of other people—my parents, my friends, and especially my crushes. I couldn’t listen to anyone greet me without flinching. My parents took me to see a therapist for over a year, and she was great, but it wasn’t enough. She wanted me on medication. No, that’s not fair; I wanted me on medication too, at first. The first time I met my psychiatrist, he spent all of five minutes with me (this would become our regular session length), half of which was spent trying to get his faulty videoconferencing technology to work. He asked me which medication I wanted to go on a minute in, and it took every ounce of self-control not to retort that which medication was the precise job I was paying him for. With his nudging, I went on Abilify. My trouble started six months afterward. I can count on one hand how many days I’ve missed because of my mental health issues in all of high school: just one. I lost track of how many days Abilify knocked me down in the fall of my sophomore year, but attendance kept the list: eighteen. In school days, that’s almost a month of missed instruction, and it took me through Christmas break to catch back up. Call me crazy, but if asked to do it again—attempt to live with my mental health issues or roll the dice on my serotonin levels--, I’d have given my therapist a different answer. I knew about medication side effects, especially when it comes to the brain, but I honestly hadn’t realized how bad they could get before starting Abilify. No one in my family knew it’d be such a hard pill to swallow. I can now tell you not all medications are worth it. I can tell you some cures are worse than their causes. I can tell you you’re not crazy for wanting to try something else, that fear isn’t always from the inside out, that hope doesn’t come from a plastic orange container. You decide what keeps you sane.

I would be an insightful yet caring high school English teacher who saves her little corner of the world, one student at a time.