The first day of school has always been so full of emotion for me. As a teacher, the night before meeting my new students, my stomach would be in knots that would not release until the last person filed out of the classroom and I could lay my head on the desk for a moment and breathe. Thank you God, we all survived. I was never a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants teacher. Extreme preparedness was my armour, because somehow in the back of my mind I must have believed the classroom was some kind of battleground. In the evening after the first day, I’d always crave KFC; fried food is good for an unsettled stomach, right? It was an unapologetic indulgence I’d earned having survived that first day of teenagers, whom, to my knowledge, didn’t hate me. And, as much as it is embarrassing to admit, no matter what lofty ambitions I might have had about what I was going to teach, I was still very much like a child who just wanted to live through the day, hoping to make a connection and not an enemy. I wanted to be liked.

Years later, without a classroom of my own, the first day of school is still kind of painful.