Dear teacher,
From the time I was little, I knew I wanted to change the world. I had big dreams, bright eyes, and hope for the future. But when you're little, you know little of this thing we call life. Maybe you've felt the cold and have seen the darkness, but the little fire inside you keeps you going.
Dear teacher,
As you grow older, those rose-colored glasses begin to become clearer, presenting the world in all its glory and pain. And you start to wonder how you can handle the situations in life that get thrown at you. You didn't ask for them, but they came anyways, creeping up on you and pulling you down when you were so close to tasting a piece of your dream. And you lose hope. You ask "why?" Because you just don't understand, how the good can follow others but it seems like every time you are within greatness' grasp, you lose your footing.
What you don't realize at the time is that these structures were built against you, that they weren't built for you. That It's not always the doing of your own but the path you were put on by the people who came before you. Before you were born, the status of who you were born to determined which path you were destined to follow in life. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but what happens when you have no village? They say you change your life by pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, but what if you were given flats? Despite your yearning to do better and defeat the odds stacked against you, your Jenga tower continues to crash down, and it's not because you didn't build it right, but because you didn't have the right amount of pieces from the start.
Dear teacher,
But then I met you. You told me I could be anything I wanted to be, that I could get wherever I wanted to go, and in my heart I believed you, but my head kept telling me no. But I met you. And since that day, education became my way out. Despite my head telling me no, my heart kept pounding for me to go on, and I kept pushing, despite the fact that I dealt with things I shouldn't have to deal with. On the days I felt like the hurdle was too tall to jump over, you reminded me that I could go around it, that I didn't have to stay on the track I was destined to. You gave me support, you gave me love, you were my village.
Dear teacher,
And little did you know that the reason I kept going on was because of you. Because you never gave up on me, when I wanted to give up on myself. Because you took the time reach out and make sure that I actually knew that I could beat the odds stacked against me. When I started on the path to where I'm going, I felt alone, because when I got to that path, I didn't feel like I could relate to the others on that path, because while their path was more of marked trail, mine took a detour though the trees, and I felt guilt, because I finally reached that trail, but didn't feel like I deserved to make it there. The trees were grown so high that the others couldn't make it though them; I was the lucky one.
Dear teacher,
The lost souls wandering in the dark, in the trees, finding their way still haunt me, because I know they deserve to be on that marked trail. And it's not fair that with my luck I stumbled onto the marked path though they've been using all of their effort to make it past those trees to no avail. And even though they still haunt me, I'm reminded of the gratitude I have for you. You didn't know you were going to impact my life in such a profound way going in, but you did just that. You're the stem to my flower, the sugar to my tea. You're the tree to my boy, and I am thankful. I can never express the gratitude I have for you wandering into my life because if you didn't find your way in, I might not have found my way out.
