Trauma and the Inspiration Behind the Book

We had a lockdown drill yesterday. Usually, lockdowns are really tough for me. Or at least, they used to be. Even when it is just a drill, it brings me back to a place of fear and helplessness. 

It reminded me why I first wanted to write Gray Area, but also why I’m so glad I wrote it. Gray Area was a therapeutic experience for me. 

My early teaching career was filled with adversity. I wanted to become a teacher to spread education. After pursuing my degree in anthropology and working on an archaeological dig in Tanzania, I became inspired by my travels and wanted to contribute what I could to the world by spreading knowledge. It’s cheesy, I know, but it’s true. That’s why I chose to pursue my masters degree and become a teacher.

I student-taught at two different schools while in graduate school.  In one, I experienced a lockdown incident that largely inspired the events in Gray Area, but the book highlights the worst of it. I was lucky to have support in my life during this time, but it is still one of the worst things that has happened in my life, and has had a deep impact on my teaching philosophy. 

I was so happy to move on and begin my career, but then my first year teaching was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. After school got out that day in March, I never got to see many of those students again, as my second year was largely taught online. My third year, I moved to a school that I hated. I feel comfortable saying that online, because I already cried in front of the head of HR for the school district about it. 

It was certainly a rough few years, and probably why teacher retention rates are so low in the first five years of the profession. I’m three years into my job at my current high school, and I love it. I smile at work every single day, and I love what I do. All of my students know this. 

Still, when it comes to safety in schools, I have bad days of anxiety, or bad nights where I’m kept up by PTSD-induced insomnia, or I momentarily shut down in public when I hear loud and sudden noises.

This is why I am so emboldened by my own response during yesterday’s drill. I didn’t even get clammy, and my heart didn’t race. I was completely calm. It could have been the great group of students I had at the time, who handled the drill with grace and minimum tomfoolery, but it was also a moment of reflection for me about what I’ve been through and how to process it. I’ve become a lot stronger, and I think writing this book was a large part of it.

For me, writing helps me process what I think. Writing Gray Area was a moment for me to process what had happened during the police-involved shooting at the middle school I was student-teaching in. Part of what was so hard for me in the aftermath was navigating between right and wrong, and discovering that sometimes we don’t have to have formed a strong and definitive stance or opinion on what’s happened. It’s okay to simply acknowledge and accept that we will never have closure.

There are so many things that I will never know, or understand, or discern between, and that is why I wrote Gray Area.