Due to a massive Polar Vortex taking a direct aim at my house almost two weeks ago, pipes froze in three locations of my house, prompting my mom and I to fire up all of the space heaters and hair dryers the circuit could handle to thaw things out before the pipes burst. 

One of these pipes was in my bedroom, with the only way to access it being through the ceiling of my closet. Taking our plumber’s advice, I took everything out of my closet, got a hammer, and broke a hole in the ceiling to access the frozen pipe. From there, I alternated between a space heater and a hair dryer until, several hours later, water finally began to flow through the faucets. 

Crisis averted. 

In the chaos, I’d carelessly thrown everything out of my closet, and one storage box full of books had spilled all over my bedroom floor. While I was cleaning things up and putting them away, I noticed that one of the books that had spilled out of that box was an old yearbook. Specifically, it was my fifth grade yearbook. 

It had been a very long time since I’d flipped through the book, so I decided to do so till I found my picture. I also found my 5th grade teacher’s picture, and couldn’t help but remember how she’d treated me. 

Like many of my K-12 teachers, my fifth grade teacher didn’t have the ability to cater to my needs. After all, she was a fairly new teacher with almost thirty other kids to worry about. Naturally, she couldn’t teach things my way, so I really struggled. And as a result of that struggle, I was barely a C-average student who was often punished for “not doing the math right”. 

By fifth grade, I was pretty much done with school, in the sense that I was miserable, anxiety-ridden, and constantly getting sick over it. Words can’t express how much I hated school, or how bad my anxiety had become. In fifth grade, I simply wanted to hole myself in my bedroom 25/8 and never leave. Because of this, I barely remember fifth grade (or fourth, or third, or any of those grades for that matter, but out of all those years, fifth grade’s the one I remember the least), so I can’t recall exactly why I was struggling so much (I’m sure my parents can, though). But I certainly remember the emotions of that year. Emotions that I had to work through in therapy as recently as last year (2023).