There are places we walk into and immediately feel our pulse change. Not because of what’s happening in the moment—but because of what has already happened there. The walls remember. Or maybe it’s us. Maybe we remember too well.
Today was the first day of summer school. My regular classroom—my quiet space of control and comfort—is under HVAC construction. That means, for the next month, I’ll be teaching in the high school building. It’s a place I know well, though I wish I didn’t. My history with that building is long, and frankly, complicated. For years, as an off-site teacher working with at-risk students, my relationship to the high school has felt like that of a distant cousin: present, acknowledged, but peripheral. I’ve been overlooked, sometimes dismissed, sometimes outright disregarded. And like anyone who has been made to feel invisible, I built up armor to survive it.
I entered the day with that armor still strapped on—resentment in one pocket, skepticism in the other. But by the time I left, something had softened. Not entirely. Not in a way that resolves all things. But enough. Enough to notice that maybe what I’ve been holding onto all these years isn’t about the building itself. It’s about the people who once filled it. And they’re not there anymore.
We don’t talk enough about workplace hurt. About how real it is. About how it lingers. Especially in schools—where the culture of professionalism often means quietly absorbing every blow. A snide comment. A meeting where your input is ignored. A student you fought for who slipped through the cracks anyway. A colleague who undercuts you. An administrator who sees numbers, not names.
It accumulates.
The psychologist Gabor Maté writes that “trauma is not what happens to you, but what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.” In other words, trauma isn’t always the catastrophe—it’s the long echo of it. It’s how we internalize judgment, isolation, and disrespect. It’s how we build stories around our pain to protect ourselves from being hurt again.
For me, that story was this: the high school doesn’t see me. Doesn’t value what I do. Doesn’t understand the work of teaching students who live on the edge of the system.
Maybe that story was true once. Maybe it wasn’t. But what matters now is that I carried it into today—and the people around me didn’t deserve it. And more than that, I didn’t deserve to carry it anymore.
Albert Anker’s 1862 painting Das Schulexamen (The School Exam) lives in this tension between performance and judgment. In it, a barefoot child stands before a tribunal of seated adults, reciting from a sheet hung on a blackboard. The examiners lean forward or away, some bored, some attentive. The child’s teacher watches, rod behind his back, as rows of children look on. The mood is reverent, almost sacred. But beneath it all, there’s a quiet tension—a sense that something more than knowledge is being evaluated.
When I look at that painting, I don’t just see a school exam. I see the emotional experience of being watched. Of standing under the scrutiny of people who have power over you. I see not just the child, but the teacher too—back stiff, hands folded, preparing for judgment himself.
The classroom isn’t just a place of learning. It’s a site of visibility. And for many teachers—especially those outside the center of institutional power—it becomes a space of ongoing emotional negotiation. You learn to read the room. To sense when you're being dismissed. To measure every word in meetings. To anticipate where the next slight might come from. And over time, those things don’t just stay at work. They bleed.
We’re told to separate work life and home life. To draw a line between the professional and the personal. But anyone who’s worked in a school—or any emotionally demanding environment—knows how false that line is.
You carry your students home in your thoughts. You replay conversations in the shower. You feel a cold silence in a hallway and wonder if it was meant for you. You pour your whole self into work, and when that self is overlooked or belittled, the pain doesn't clock out at 3:30.
Professional relationships are relationships. They have the power to shape how we see ourselves. How we value our contributions. How we view our place in the world. And when those relationships are marked by disrespect or marginalization, it’s not petty to feel hurt. It’s human.
But time changes things. People leave. Systems shift. And sometimes, without realizing it, we change too.
Today, standing once again in those hallways, I expected to feel angry. Instead, I felt strangely fine. The ghosts weren’t gone—but they no longer had their grip on me. The people who once triggered that sense of erasure are no longer there. And maybe more importantly, I’m not the same person who once needed their validation.
The work I do still matters. The students I serve still deserve everything I have. But the story I tell myself about where I belong—that’s what changed today. I don’t need the high school to see me the way I once did. I see myself now. I know what I’m worth. And in that knowing, the old resentment begins to loosen.
Maybe this is what healing looks like—not erasure of memory, but its reframing. Maybe the rooms we fear walking into aren’t haunted by others, but by former versions of ourselves. Versions still waiting to be affirmed. Still hoping to be seen.
But now I can walk those halls with quiet dignity. Not because everything is fixed, but because I no longer need it to be.
And maybe that’s the lesson of Das Schulexamen too: that being watched doesn’t always mean being judged. Sometimes, it means being witnessed. And sometimes, it means learning to witness yourself.