It was Senior year of high school. I and the other members of the Chamber Choir had gone on a retreat to Seattle, Washington, to workshop with local college professors and to participate in a jazz festival. It was a great opportunity to improve our musicality, as well as grow and bond as a team.

And I was miserable.

On the second night of the trip, the choir was sitting together in a circle at a local YMCA, where we would be spending the night. It was very late, and we had an early morning to the next day, but we all fought out exhaustion in order to receive our commemorative t-shirts. Aware that I would probably be snapped at by our choir director Mrs. Dairy (a pseudonym to protect her identity, so chosen for reasons to be explained later), I kept my eyes open long enough to receive my shirt and inspect it, fully planning to conk out at the nearest available opportunity.

But as I sleepily scanned the list of the names of choir members on the back of the shirt, I grew more awake, and my heart begin to sink. Everyone around me was oohing and aahing over the shirts, pulling them on over their clothes, or just laughing about the day. But I sat quietly across the floor from Mrs. Dairy, staring numbly at a shirt design that seemed to throw the entire year in my face with all the delicacy of a punch to the gut.

My name wasn’t on the shirt.

And as I watched Mrs. Dairy scan her own shirt to confirm this, only once I had pointed it out, she turned to me with an expression devoid of apology – an expression that I had seen on her face too often to not know by then. I saw steely-eyed blankness.

It’s hard to come to grips with the idea that your teacher doesn’t like you.

It hadn’t always been that way, either.

Mrs. Dairy came to my high school just the year before, replacing a much beloved music teacher and choir director. As such, she had big shoes to fill, and both she and her students had to come to terms with the expectations that each other party had. I for one found her a wacky, intelligent, sarcastic woman who had an unparalleled love for music, and a standard of excellence that would not be compromised. And personal troubles from her private life that began to spill out between classes revealed that she was a deeply caring woman, cemented by how visibly she threw herself into the success of the choir.

I, for one, adored her. But many of my classmates disagreed. Where I saw wackiness, they saw flightiness. Where I saw intelligence, they saw vanity. Where I saw sarcasm, they saw cruelty. And what I had originally pegged as simply an adjustment period between teacher and students exacerbated to the point where a frustrated thirty-plus person choir dropped to only twelve.

With only three people per voice part, the choir was in the very real danger of being shut down constantly. But in spite of all that was happening, and all that the choir needed in order to keep going, the twelve of us and Mrs. Dairy rallied around each other. We became each other’s musical confidantes, brothers and sisters in arms. Every person mattered vocally, and because of that we truly began to value each other as individuals. Our musicality increased, we sang challenging pieces to display that, and every afternoon of Junior year I could count on being surrounded by twelve other people who intrinsically trusted me like I trusted them. And trusts forged from hard and emotional times are so often the strongest.

Senior year, however, had none of that. Of the twelve students of the year before, only two other than me came back due to either graduation, class schedules, or transfer. Our success from the previous year as well as the incoming freshman provided us with twenty or so new faces to sing with. It really was a rags to riches story, and I thought that things were going to go wonderfully.

I must have pissed off a Lovecraftian god of some sort, though.

Senior year brought with it challenges both academic and emotional, which left my admittedly already short temper raw and irritated. And while I thoroughly did think highly of my new choir group, I didn’t have the patience for the early class to listen to their chatter, and I quickly earned a reputation for shushing the others. It wasn’t a fun reputation to have, and I could feel the people I didn’t know as well draw away from me, which only made me feel more irritable as I realized I was becoming something I abhorred – the cranky senior.

On top of that, the friendship I had with Mrs. Dairy began to fall to pieces. I can’t pinpoint exactly how or why, but something happened that made the respect we built for each other the year crumple apart. I began to find her sarcasm a little too biting or her intelligent a little too prideful, all the things that others had complained about her before. I grew silent in class, biting my tongue as I felt my edges fraying from stress by both my peers and my teacher. And from my perspective, she didn’t seem to be able to have much more patience with me. Smiles to me didn’t reach her eyes, and her voice took a hard edge when we spoke.

It was nothing like the year before. But it was the memory of that golden year that kept me going. I couldn’t abandon the feeling of family that my Junior choir provided because of a few bumps as a senior.

See, there was also a Choir retreat in my junior year, but instead of Seattle, we went up to the mountains to stay in a cabin for the weekend. We practiced our vocal technique, of course, but we also hiked, cooked our own meals, rode the zip line, played games, watched a movie, shared our feelings like the big clump of gooey saps that we were, all in the beauty of the purple mountains majesty. We didn’t have any shirts for the trip, but I can still remember every detail, like being stuck in a cupboard with my friend Tia, or being introduced to Wreck-It Ralph by my friend Jason, or accidently kneeing my friend Trent in the crotch. And I think that if you can remember every detail of a vacation, it’s probably indicative of how much it meant to you. I adored that choir.

But there I was, a year later, a part of a choir that I felt didn’t really want me, and the visible evidence being worn by everybody there.

I know that having my name listed on a shirt doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. And it was all in all a total accident that was not indicative of the abrasive nature of my relationship with my Senior year chamber choir. And even if Mrs. Dairy disliked me, she wouldn’t have purposefully left me off a t-shirt design she likely only had a small hand in creating.

But I have never forgotten the expression she gave me that night in the YMCA, completely devoid of anything in the vein of sympathy.

So why hold on to this damn shirt, then?

To me, this shirt represents a complex relationship with a choir director, a friendship both sweet and bitter. And that, in turn, is a lesson worth holding onto – people change. There is nothing in this life that can last forever, and even the most wonderful of experiences can rot into painful daily exercises in patience and forgiveness. And in a time of my life where it becomes more real that some people are only ever in your life for a brief season, it’s important to recognize the value in letting go when you need to.

There was nothing stopping me from leaving choir Senior year when I realized I got no pleasure from it. Nothing, that is, but the idyllic memories of the past. And you can’t live that way. I can’t, anyway. It only blinds people to reality that the situation they are in is toxic. And in a day and age where holding onto the memories of things has lead so many of us into trouble, from romance to social attitudes to even gun laws, none of us can afford to consider the past to be a fool-proof litmus test for the present.

This shirt reminds me that I have the power to leave toxic environments. And I hope that I’ve reminded you of the same.