One day at lunch during college, Larry McMurtry came up. McMurtry, hailing from not far from my home town, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, several Oscars, and various other things, had always been a bit of a touchstone from me. The Last Picture Show is one of the most beautiful, heartbreaking movies ever made, and Texasville was shot, in part, in my town. I often reference it when people ask where I’m from; sadly, a decreasing number know what I’m referring to. But, the point is, one day at lunch during college, Larry McMurtry, who’d once taught at that very campus, came up.

One of my tablemates hadn’t heard of him. I was genuinely surprised and incredulous and said so. A third party turned to me, “You know, you’re really fucking annoying.” I was 20 or 21 then. I’m 37 now, and that has stuck with me. That cut was deep. It was deep in part because it was true.

Good shepherds

People love to tell me I don’t have an accent. I think they think they’re complimenting me. They’re not. As I’ve moved further and further from home, I’ve been told this more and more. It started in college.

I’d gone from my tiny, two stoplight town to one of the largest cities in the U.S. and found myself in a context I couldn’t have imagined, really. That experience was lonely even if I wasn’t alone in it. Students come to our campuses from all over the city and all over the world. They come well-prepared from elite magnet schools in tony suburbs and having fought tooth and nail through under-resourced high schools just down the block. They come from conditions I couldn’t imagine surviving and opportunities I still wish teenage me could have had.

My students, generally, are kind to one another. I watch them share notes with absent classmates, I politely turn them away when they try to pick up graded work for dorm neighbors. On a study abroad last summer, when one student fell ill, the entire group took on the task of making sure he was cared for, bringing him food and fluids and medicine and updating the faculty on his condition. So often, my students serve each other as shepherds.

Knives out

But, occasionally, the knives come out. I hate it in part because sometimes I feel it. An echo of an echo. An itch in an old scar. Once, for reasons I still can’t fathom, a student included in information submitted to me a cruel nickname a pack of students had taken to calling one of their classmates. Apparently, they didn’t even know his name. I knew who they meant immediately, and I felt shocked and sad for the target. In my office, I called various parties on campus to ask advice on what to do. At home, I teared up relaying the story to my partner.

Knowing students are sometimes mean to one another and being forced into complicity are two different things. I’m not sure what the right thing is; I’m not sure I did the right thing. What I know is, I wish I just didn’t know. We’re all palimpsests of the experiences we’ve lived through. In general, I try not to be part of someone else’s accreted insecurities.

I think often of George Saunders’s vivid depiction of his biggest regret: a mundane “failure of kindness” that surely we have all been guilty of. But, I’m also sure we’ve all been the victims of it, too. We’ve had our foibles thrown in our faces or had knives twisted in the open wounds of insecurity. It’s so easy to be pointlessly, lazily cruel and so hard to slow down and be kind. Watching the students I teach struggle through this is one of the hardest parts of my job.

Half a million miles from home

The culture shock of going to college had a major formative effect on me; one repeated a few years later when I started graduate school. It’s something that informs my approach to teaching and mentoring and is at the heart of who I am now. I try my best to be careful and patient with people, whether I like them or not. How I treat people isn’t about them, it’s about me. We’re all palimpsests of the experiences we’ve lived through. In general, I try not to be part of someone else’s accreted insecurities.

The difference between the college-aged version of me and present-tense me isn’t that I don’t get my feelings hurt, but that I believe I deserve to be treated ok even if I’m not perfect. There isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with who I am, whether it’s the parts of me that came from years of study or the parts of me that came from growing up in a busted boomtown.

I am from a place you’ve never heard of. I actually do have an accent. And, sometimes, I’m really fucking annoying. But, I’m doing my best, and I assume everyone else is, too.