Life after Disgrace: Counseling an Old Student

Two weeks ago, I got a message from a former student, asking to meet. 

“I’m going through a hard time,” he says. “It’s of my own making.” He says he thinks I’ll understand.

“Eric” is in his early forties and took each segment of my Western Civ course in 2002-2003.  He later became a high school teacher in another Southern California county. Eric is married and has two young children.  

After more than a decade in the classroom, Eric is also in the process of being terminated by his school district due to allegations of “grooming” an underage student.  The police found no criminal activity, but Eric’s teaching career is over. “It’s probably fair that they fire me,” he says.

When we meet, I recognize Eric instantly, which surprises me. I taught more than 15,000 students in my 20 years at Pasadena City College, and Eric was not a close mentee of mine, but there’s something about his patrician nose and wide set eyes that help me recall a scruffy young man, a patchy red beard, and a frequently worn Weezer t-shirt. I seem to remember he got a B.

Eric and I haven’t spoken in more than twenty years. He tells me, as we sit at the coffee shop, that he read my old blog for years. He followed enough of my story to know that I lost my marriage, my career, and my reputation. He knows I have been shamed and I have been homeless, and that I spent many years working in a grocery store before building a writing career.

Eric wants to know how I didn’t kill myself. Eric wants reasons to hope. He is polite, and calm, but I recognize the hunted look. It is the look of a man who has not only lost his career, but irrevocably changed the course of his children’s lives. When a father who loves his little ones realizes that his own impulses have just given his kids what the therapists call a major Adverse Childhood Experience?  The horror of that awareness is always just behind the eyelids.

This is the look of a man who has seen his wife’s face twist and change as she absorbs not only a betrayal of marriage vows, but of her children’s safety, security, happiness, and future.

I tell him that we, the justly disgraced,  survive first and foremost by breaking the day down into a series of small manageable tasks. We do the next right thing, because there is always a next right thing, even if it is the first right thing after 796 wrong things in a row. We say, “Today, I need to eat.” “Today, I apply for five jobs.” “Today, I take my son to baseball practice.”

“Today, I don’t kill myself. Just for today.”

We string together small achievements, collecting tiny wins. We remind ourselves that this is the third or fourth act of a five-act play. Eric doesn’t teach English, but look, everyone knows the beats and stations of the hero’s journey.  This is the season of ashes. This is where we reap the consequences of the hubris, the concupiscence, the unchecked ego.  It will not last forever.

If we don’t die, and we don’t make it worse, I tell Eric, the wheel will turn.

I tell Eric that no one really wants him to die, no matter how betrayed or furious they may seem. They want him to live, and they even want him to be redeemed, but they are unwilling to be too close while that redemption works itself out. I suspect Eric is exhausted from other people’s disappointment in him, and discouraged by what seems like the certainty that there is nothing he can do to assuage that hurt and anger.

There will come a day, I tell Eric, when people will say to you, softly, that they are proud that you didn’t quit, you didn’t spiral into self-destruction. Someone – maybe not your children’s mom, but someone – will say that they are glad you stayed in this world, that you survived the disgust and the anger. Somehow, you kept your head above the surface as you were swept away on that great flood of consequences.

You survived even your own self-loathing. That’s no small feat.

I told Eric I had “teaching dreams” for years after I left PCC. I told him I replayed every affair in my mind, every moment where I crossed a line I ought not have crossed, every kiss, every text, every reckless instance of muttering “To hell with it, why not? ”

When I tell Eric I had those dreams for seven years after I resigned, his eyes widen. He is only a few months into this new world, a new arrival in a strange and hostile land. Eric’s head has told him that he is never going back to his old life, but his heart still hopes.  I ask if he fantasizes about the call from the district, saying the charges are dropped, and asking if he can be back in the classroom on Monday. 

That question hits home, and Eric’s eyes well up.  I pat his arm, and we say nothing, and together, look out the window to watch the traffic on Pico Boulevard.

I repeat that he will make it through. Whatever harm he has done to his children through his recklessness will only be compounded if he kills himself. They are young, and so is he, and there is time to create different memories for them.  When a man has made great mistakes, he can still be defined – at least in part – by how he wrote and lived the subsequent chapters. 

Eric nods.  He brightens as he asks about my ghostwriting career. It seems like I’m thriving, he says.

I tell him I’m grateful, but it’s up and down, and at this very moment, I don’t have July rent. “I’m a month away from being broke again,” I say, and add that it’s possible other gigs will come through – and possible that they won’t. Regardless, I’ll be fine. I am worried about the future, and sometimes I wake up in panic, but deep down? I know I can land on my feet.

I am anxious, but I am not afraid, and I now understand there is a real difference.

I tell Eric that what I went through in 2013 (and for years afterwards) toughened as much as it traumatized; it gave me a certainty that I can survive.  If I need to go back to Trader Joe’s and delivering laundry? I will. I’ll keep my commitments to existing clients, to my aging mama, to my growing children. The muscle memory of what it takes to survive, to hustle, and to provide? That endures.

“It almost sounds like you’re glad it happened,” Eric says, referring to 2013.  I tell him that’s a construct, a story I tell myself. How can one be glad about having hurt so many? I can be glad that I survived, that I made the amends I could, that there was a chance to still do some good, kind, interesting things.  Just because so much good has come since my fall from grace doesn’t mean the fall was good or right or necessary. It is just a fact, a choice that cannot be unchosen, and I have done the best I can since. 

I can be grateful for everything that has come since the catastrophe even while wishing the catastrophe had been avoided. 

We both have other engagements, and so our meeting is brief. I ask Eric to keep in touch, and to text anytime. I promise to check in on him.  He thanks me, and I tell him the only possible thing in reply: someday, years from now, he will be in my shoes, counseling and comforting someone in the throes of a fresh disgrace. He won’t offer stern rebukes or platitudes. He’ll have a story to tell, and it will feel good to tell it.

Some of you are still stuck on the fourth paragraph, where I mentioned that Eric is in the process of losing his job for grooming a student. You think of your own experiences, or your own children, and you grow angry at the attempt to humanize a teacher who would do such a thing.  But your better self doesn’t want Eric to die. You want him to live, and if he is to live, surely he should live as well as he can with the time he has remaining.  It is my honor and my duty to help him, and men and women like him, do just that.