Don’t cry! Don’t you dare cry! You are in a gym full of grade nine and ten students, do not let them see you cry, I thought as I looked up to see a set of concerned steely grey eyes looking at me. Slowly, I peeled my hand from my forehead and reached out to take my glasses from the hands of the offending teenager.

“Are you alright, Miss?” He asked, his voice shaking with the effort of trying to remain empathetic instead of breaking down into fits of laughter. We were in the middle of gym class and with the grade nine and ten students, there were always a few hazards to watch out for. Today it was a tennis ball, travelling as if at the speed of light, off the rim of a tennis racket, set on an unavoidable collision course with my forehead, right between my eyes. I remember this as if it were yesterday. I stifled the tears and the pain, picked up the tennis ball and with my chin stubbornly raised high, I handed it back to him muttering something about being fine.

He was the kind of boy that was so wrapped tight his anger would explode from him like a firecracker. It got him into trouble at school, it got him into trouble in life. He was distant and protective of himself, and always gave off an air of being too wise, to experienced for school. He had seen things and experienced life and that set him apart from the others. He was the kind of boy who was built to work with his hands, not with school books.

I saw him graduate, saw him off to college in the suburbs and wondered, as I always did, how my small country students would cope in the big wide world. I ran into him at an eighteenth birthday party. I approached him and asked him about his first year of college, and I can still hear his words, “if there’s one thing I regret it’s not listening to my teachers. I thought I knew it all, but I didn’t. I should have listened and paid more attention.” He took a step towards me, uncrossed his arms and said, “my sister? If you ever have any trouble from her, let me know and I’ll sort it out. I don’t want her to go down the same way I did.”

Two weeks later, I was standing in my classroom, breathing deep and preparing myself for the day when my principal walked in. Ushering me outside, she told me that the boy with the steely grey eyes had taken himself home. Something within me came crashing down, and once again, I thought, Don’t cry! Don’t you dare cry! You are about to start the day and you can’t fall apart. They need you. I locked that crashing feeling up tight, took a deep, shaky breath and walked into my classroom mere seconds before the bell rang and the day was off and racing, as they so often did. When you’re a teacher, you learn to put the well being of the young people in your care, before your own. You learn to always be fine, even when you’re not. This is the first time I felt unsupported, let down, and angry at the teaching life I had chosen to live.

I hadn’t processed the grief until it hit me yesterday. To be honest, I hadn’t even realised it was still a thing. It’s come up for a number of reasons – I’ve stepped back into teaching in a school setting again, I’ve enrolled to study a Graduate Certificate in Child and Adolescent Mental Health and I had a wonderful Reiki session on Friday, each of which partially turned the key to open the door to my grief and my experience of losing a student on the mental health battle ground.

I’ve always held onto an element of…I should have done something more. Since then, I’ve seen many instances of children and young people battling their own mental health issues, and it breaks my heart. I try to honour the lessons he taught me, and help when I can. I try to be a safe person – someone my students can turn to, to talk to, to open up to. I have held onto so many young people’s stories and life experiences and helped to carry them. But, I need to be able to do more. I will arm myself with the skills and the strategies to help children and young people navigate their lives, and I will step up and help them learn skills and strategies to fight their own mental health battles. I will not let another steely grey eyed teenage boy down again.

When you walk this path, the path of awareness and connection, the path of spirituality, you are going to face the things buried deep within you, those experiences that have left their memories and their marks. Maybe they’re exactly like this – experiences you don’t even realise you still carry with you. The story of the boy with the steely grey eyes has had such an impact on me that it is shaping my future, the direction my life is heading and the path that I have chosen to follow. It was all on a subconscious level, until it wasn’t. I’m excited about starting my studies, because it means I get to start walking the path this experience has set me on. I get to start making a bigger difference in the lives of young people. I get to learn skills and strategies, so that I am no longer powerless in similar circumstances. I am afraid of starting my studies, because it means I will be confronted by my own mental health battle, and with those of the students I have taught in the past.

One thing I’ve learnt, if excitement and fear are both present, there’s something in it for me. There’s something to pay attention to. If I can leave you with one piece of advice, take your experiences and use them to move you forward. Look back at the things that have left huge impacts on your life, because in those experiences are the clues about your where to next.