Dear 6-year-old Jillian,

It is your first day of first grade at St. Mary’s Catholic School. You sit in a giant, dimly-lit auditorium among other first graders, waiting for your name to be called so you can join your new classmates and teacher. You don’t know it yet, but Mommy spots a crow-like woman with short black hair and a permanent sneer, and then says to Daddy: “I hope Jillian doesn’t get her.”

Guess what? That is your new teacher, Ms. Paul.

You had liked your kindergarten teacher at St. Mary’s, so you might think you will like this teacher, too. Only that is not the case.

From day one, it is obvious you don’t fit in. You don’t conform to the school’s expectations. Not only that, it is obvious you are struggling socially and academically. Except the school does not have the resources to give you what you need, despite making parents pay through the nose to send their children to this supposed “elite” school. They don’t even have playground equipment.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, other students pick on you and ignore you, and so does Ms. Paul.

She belittles you every chance she gets. She calls you a spoiled brat. She blames you when other students do something wrong and even makes them leave you out of classroom games. She lets the class laugh at you. And she once dumped all the contents of your desk onto the floor and then made you pick it up- for no good reason.

Because you were different.

Because you didn’t belong.

It is the loneliest year of your life, and you have blocked out all the memories of that year, even the good ones. Like the fact you won the science fair with your solar system project or the sweet teaching assistant who did try to help you or the fourth grader you were buddied with during a program. Their faces and names are gone from your memory, because the bad ones hurt too much. But you will always remember being told by your parents you have to repeat the first grade.

Daddy tries to be nice about it. He says, “You’re not ready for second grade. You need a little more time, that’s all.” Mommy struggles to hide her anger and her disappointment, both at Ms. Paul, the school, herself, and, maybe, at me. And Daddy never lets her forget that he blamed her for making me go to St. Mary’s. It was her idea to begin with.

Thankfully, though, you don’t have to go back to St. Mary’s. Your parents pull you out and send you to Elizabeth Pole Elementary School. There, kids are much nicer to you and you get the help you need from certified teachers and professionals, not former nuns. Slowly, things look up.

You will never be as lonely as you were at St. Mary’s ever again, but you only let a few people in. Most times, they like you, but you are not elevated to the same “best friend” status as you do to them. You may have let the wrong ones in and kept the right ones out. Because you feel different from other people in your class. You are older than most of them. You look it, too—you are already wearing bras most girls in your class won’t see until middle school. That just brings on a whole round of changes you never wanted.

But I want you to know this: everything happens for a reason. Because you went through all that, you will learn that you are different and where you grew up is not where you are meant to live the rest of your life. You will go to college and meet your true friends, people who understand you and make you feel accepted. A whole new side of yourself is unleashed, a person you knew existed but hid away.

Your professors will support you in ways your teachers growing up, as well as your parents and some family members, didn’t always do. They see something in you that people in your hometown never did. They help you find it and bring it out.

The best thing, though, is that you will surprise everyone who ever doubted you. You proved to them that you are worth something. Because you are worth something.

Love,

Jillian, age 23