My Secret Public Journal

There is something unsettling about Glyn Warren Philpot’s Saint Sebastian. Sebastian is not presented as the serene, idealized martyr familiar from so many Renaissance paintings. His body twists beneath the violence done to it. His head collapses forward. The arrows remain lodged in his flesh, and the entire composition seems compressed around him, as though the world itself has tightened. He is wounded, but he is not yet dead. He exists in that strange interval between what has happened and what will happen next.

That interval feels familiar to me tonight.

On Monday, I begin a new position as the In-School Detention facilitator at Joplin High School. I have worked for the high school for sixteen years, but most of that time I have existed somewhat outside it, both literally and institutionally. My programs have been housed off-site. I have belonged to the high school without quite inhabiting it. Now I am moving into the building itself, into its daily rhythms, its hallways, its faculty, and its complicated ecosystem of students, teachers, administrators, bells, interruptions, expectations, and relationships.

This week has been professional development, but it has felt like something more. I have met people I knew only by name. I have set up a new room. I have learned where things are and how things move. I have begun recognizing the rhythms that everyone else seems to know instinctively. There has been the ordinary awkwardness of being new in a place where I am not actually new. After nearly two decades in the district and sixteen years connected to this school, I find myself asking basic questions, learning procedures, and figuring out where I fit.

And yet I have felt energized by it.

Perhaps that is what surprises me most.

At the end of last school year, I applied for a number of different positions. I was ready for something new. I wanted to grow, to stretch, to see whether the experience and education I had accumulated might open another door. Again and again, those doors remained closed.

Rejection is an interesting kind of wound because it is usually invisible. No one sees it unless we tell them about it. Professionally, we are expected to absorb it gracefully. Someone else was a better fit. The committee went another direction. The position required something different. All of those explanations may be perfectly reasonable, and still rejection accumulates.

After enough of it, the question quietly changes.

At first the question is, Why didn’t I get this job?

Eventually it becomes, Does anyone want me?

That is a dangerous transition because the professional and the personal begin bleeding into one another. I know intellectually that hiring decisions are not judgments about the total worth of a human being. I have served on enough committees and spent enough time in education to understand how complicated these decisions can be. But intellectual understanding does not necessarily protect us emotionally. We are not disembodied résumés. We carry our work inside our identities.

For much of my adult life, teaching has been one of the primary ways I have understood myself. To repeatedly offer that self toward something new and be told no inevitably leaves a mark.

Perhaps that is part of what I see in Sebastian.

The arrows are obvious, but I do not think the painting interests me because I can assign each arrow to a particular disappointment. That would be too simple. What interests me is the cumulative nature of the wound. Sebastian’s body carries evidence that something has happened to him. He cannot simply pretend otherwise. Whatever comes next will be experienced by a person who has already been pierced.

Transitions are often described with gentler metaphors. We speak of opening doors, turning pages, beginning chapters, or taking the next step. Those metaphors are comforting because they imply that transformation can be clean. One thing ends and another begins.

But change rarely feels that tidy.

Sometimes transition is a wound.

Something familiar has to be punctured. Some version of ourselves has to become unstable. The routines that once defined us stop functioning. The relationships that gave shape to our days change. Even when the transition is chosen, there is grief involved because possibility always requires surrender. To become something new, I have to relinquish at least part of what I have been.

Anthropologists describe this condition as liminality: the threshold state in which a person is no longer entirely what they were but has not yet fully become what they will be. That is where I find myself tonight. My former position is behind me. My new position has a name, a room, expectations, procedures, and plans, but it has not yet become lived experience.

I have not yet welcomed the first student into ISD.

I have not yet discovered which of my ideas will work and which will need to be abandoned.

I have not yet experienced the hard days that will inevitably come.

For the moment, I am standing at the threshold.

What makes this particular threshold different is that, after months of professional rejection, I feel remarkably wanted.

That may be the most important thing about this week.

People have welcomed me. They have stopped to talk. They have asked questions about what I am building. They have expressed interest in what ISD might become. I have felt that my presence matters. It is difficult to articulate how powerful that feeling can be after a season in which I repeatedly wondered whether there was another place for me.

There is an enormous psychological difference between occupying a position and being received into one.

Belonging is not simply being assigned a room.

It is sensing that someone is glad you are there.

I do not want to romanticize this. Monday will not reveal that I have finally discovered some perfect professional home. Schools are human institutions, which means they are complicated, inconsistent, generous, frustrating, compassionate, bureaucratic, inspiring, and exhausting—often before lunch. ISD itself exists precisely because students and adults sometimes collide with those complications.

I also resist the temptation to look backward and claim that every rejection somehow happened for a reason. That kind of storytelling can turn suffering into a cheap form of providence. The disappointments were real. I wanted some of those opportunities. I believed I was capable of doing those jobs. Being passed over hurt.

I do not need those rejections to have been secretly good in order for something good to exist now.

Meaning does not require that every wound be justified.

Sometimes meaning emerges because we survive the wound long enough to see what comes after it.

That is another reason Sebastian matters here.

In the traditional story, the arrows do not kill him. He is discovered wounded and is cared for. The martyrdom we usually associate with Sebastian is, at this moment, incomplete. He exists between injury and restoration.

Philpot captures that suspended moment. Sebastian is neither triumphant nor destroyed. He is simply wounded and still present.

There is something deeply human in that.

We spend much of our lives in these incomplete states. We want clean narratives because they are easier to understand. Success. Failure. Beginning. Ending. Rejection. Acceptance.

But most of life happens between those categories.

I can be disappointed by the paths that closed and grateful for the one that opened.

I can grieve the work I am leaving and be excited about the work ahead.

I can feel like the same teacher I have always been while recognizing that I am becoming a different kind of teacher.

I can carry the memory of rejection into a place where I feel wanted.

Perhaps that is the real work of transition: not erasing what came before, but learning how to carry it differently.

On Monday morning, I will walk into my room and begin.

The plans will stop being plans. Students will arrive. The rhythms I have been observing will begin carrying me with them. ISD will stop being something I have designed on paper and become something lived among actual people with actual needs.

And somewhere within that process, the identity I am currently imagining will become ordinary.

For now, though, I remain with Sebastian.

I remain in that uncomfortable, hopeful space between the wound and the healing.

For perhaps the first time in a long while, I am not asking whether someone wants what I have to offer.

I am standing at the edge of something new with the strange and deeply welcome feeling that they already do.