Facing My Truth

She called to me outside the doorway of the classroom as the others in the class passed us on their way out.  She said, “You really could be doing much better, you know; you have a lot more to offer all of us.” 

Dr. Wilder had a voice like a singer who smoked.  There was a husky reediness in it.  Perhaps there was a mystery in her, too, attractive and single as she entered middle age.  Maybe there was an extra bite in the truth of her statement because there was something of a peer relationship between us; she being younger than most of the faculty was more like an older sister than a parent.  I was a colleague by then, taking graduate courses in the evening after my work as an academic advisor for freshmen.  There was a certain loss of anonymity as a colleague.  Mediocre students graduate and leave.  Colleagues remain, and see in the eyes of their teaching colleagues the truth in themselves; in my case, it was my well-honed underachievement.     

I don’t remember a lot of the material in Joan Wilder’s Philosophy of Education course.  I suppose I could blame my literal preoccupation for my lack of preparation in class, for my disappointing her with the shallowness of my participation.  By then I was a husband and father, a homeowner and a landlord, pursuing my graduate degree in the hope of outlasting the Vietnam-era military draft.   But the truth that she told me that afternoon outside the classroom really stuck with me.  I remember reflecting on it as I walked down the hallway of the Briggs Building, on the way it was yet another teacher calling me on my performing well below my potential.  I remember feeling not the usual shame or defensiveness, but agreement.  She was right.  And the intimacy with which she delivered the assessment, close enough that I could see my reflection in her eyes and smell the residue of cigarette on her breath, made its verity unquestionable.  

Maybe all of us walk around with the dirty secret of our frailty, our smallness, each of us finding different ways to appear bigger, stronger, more self-sufficient.  Maybe all of us harbor, at least from time to time, a fear that we’ll be found out by our friends, our children, our partners.  Joan welcomed me to a certain kind of learning in my life at UDM.  She was the first of hundreds of colleagues who would tell me the truth about myself, who would tell me the good and hard and welcome news, that I had potential, and responsibility to develop it, who would call me to life in the university where the pursuit of truth included the truth about myself.

My colleagues helped me accept frailness and smallness as something worth questioning, testing whether it is true or false humility, the respect for limitations or a kind of self-pitying distraction and excuse.  They helped me see myself as a learner in a community of learners.  In a lifetime there among colleagues like Joan Wilder, there were many intimate comments that called me to reckoning.  But I am blessed that they were, like hers, spoken in intimate respect, a call not to feel shame, but to respond to talent.  

She was right.  I did have a lot to offer.  And those times that I didn’t allow my smallness and preoccupation to distract me, great things happened.  And they happened in great company.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.