Words Can Hit

By: Tamara Gestetner

This week on a podcast, I sat across from a young lady who experienced difficulties in her school years because she was rejected by schools. Application after application. Interview after interview, adults sized her up and decided that for whatever reason, they could not accept her. I sat across from this now grown young woman who overcame these challenges, nodding along like a professional, but underneath the nodding, I was 14 again, sitting in a different office, hearing a different verdict.

My principal disliked me. I don’t say that as a dramatic flourish, I say it because it’s the accurate word. She did not merely find me difficult. She had a genuine antipathy toward me. I felt it every time I walked past her office, which was often because my parents were in her office more than they were at work (it seemed). I used to watch my mother’s face when the school called, a particular tiredness settling in before she even picked up the phone. And a part of me that watched her decided that I was the reason my mother always looked so tired. I don’t remember most of what I did wrong. I remember the tone. I remember being a problem before I was a full-fledged adult. And I remember, from a young age, feeling the shame of being someone adults had discounted before I even had the chance to start.

I remember the day, sitting in one of those hard plastic chairs, when my principal looked past my parents and said directly to me that I would never amount to anything. Not “I know you’re struggling” or “I’m concerned about your path.” Yes, she said it: that I would never amount to anything.

I didn’t cry in that room. I would never cry in front of someone who hated me. Some instinct inside of me refused to hear it. Even now. But in the car, after my mother had to pull over, I cried so hard that I couldn’t get air in right. And underneath the crying was something worse: a flicker of agreement. Some sick little relief that finally someone had said it out loud. I had already been telling myself that I was nothing for years. She had just articulated it from behind a very neat desk beneath a diploma and numerous good citizenship awards.

I didn’t tell this story for a long time. Not to friends. Not really to my husband (not the ugly parts; just the cutesy parts). I just framed it as a “believe-it-or-not” mean principal story. I left out the part where I believed her—and how long her words held weight.

I got married. I built a life. And one day, years after I’d stopped being anyone’s student, I sat down and wrote her a letter. I told her I graduated with honors. And I told people for years that I wrote the letter to set the record straight. But that’s not the honest answer. The truth is that I was still the young girl in the plastic chair. And though I couldn’t make her take back her horrid words, I tried to force her hand with a piece of paper instead. I wanted her to feel something. And if I’m being honest with you, I wanted her to hurt a little too.

I’m not proud of that. I’m done pretending it isn’t true.

She never answered the letter. I don’t know if she even remembers me. And that’s the part I can’t get past, even now, writing this. A sentence that blindsided a fourteen-year-old was, to the person who said it, probably nothing. Weightless. Just one of a thousand things she said to a thousand kids that year, each one that might have walked out carrying different versions of the same bruise. I spent years of my life proving something to a woman that likely never gave me a second thought after I left that office.

I think about this in my practice quite a lot. But I also think about it in my kitchen too. In the moments I catch myself needing my husband to tell me I did something right—almost as much as I need oxygen.

People come to me in mid-life after marrying, raising kids, and having careers, that someone: a teacher, coach, or principal said something that never left. It just went underground and kept judging everything from below the surface.

We act like trauma needs a capital letter and a diagnosis. Half the adults I sit with, myself included, were quietly sentenced in a hallway at fifteen by someone who has probably forgotten their names.

I don’t have a neat ending to this essay. I still don’t know if I’ve forgiven that lady or just got tired of hauling around the memory and the hurt. I teach a college class at Touro now, and when a student comes in all defensive or closed in or used to being written off before anyone’s given them a chance, I find myself paying closer attention to them, not less. I know exactly what it costs to be on the other end of that look. Which tells you the sentence is still alive in me somewhere. Even in the version of me everyone thinks got past it, it’s still shaping who I refuse to become.

Sometimes I think about the two of us as two separate lines running through time. She (wherever she is now) probably retired with no conscious memory of the difficult girl who once sat across from her, the one she said those words to (which have long since dissolved). And me, still occasionally circling back to that scene in the office like it’s a scene I never fully left, still doing the math on it in therapy sessions that have nothing to do with her at all. I used to think that was a failure on my part, that a healthier person would have let it go by now. I don’t think that anymore. I think some sentences just cost more than others, and you don’t get to choose in advance which ones you’ll still be paying off decades later.

The young lady on my podcast this week is still so early in her version of this. Although she’s an adult now, she’s still fighting the battle of her school years, fighting for a seat in the room before anyone has bothered to ask what she might actually be capable of doing. I wanted to reach through the microphone to that young girl and tell her that whatever people said to her in those years, kind or not, doesn’t matter in the long run. She will get to decide later on what to do with it. I wanted her to know that the sentence doesn’t have to be the last one—that she can be the master of her own destiny.

I got to write my own ending, even if it took me longer than I would have liked, even if on certain days, I’m still writing it. That’s the part I hold onto now. Not that the sentence stopped hurting, but that it stopped being the only sentence. 

Tamara Gestetner, LMFT, is a psychotherapist and certified mediator based in Cedarhurst who helps individuals and couples navigate relationships, career questions, and the challenges people face in everyday life. She is also the host of the podcast Talk2Tamara. Readers are welcome to submit questions or topics they would like addressed in future columns. Tamara can be reached at TamaraGestetner.com, [email protected], or 646-239-5686