i was raised to know
every open wound on this earth
is a wound of mine
and every time I’m on my knees
refusing to stand and be a healer
i may as well be the disease.
Andrea Gibson

‍

By the time we moved to Colorado when I was 10, I’d already had countless bee stings on the soles of my feet because I refused to wear shoes. We had three apple trees in Pennsylvania, so the soft grass and squish of rotting fruit was occasionally interrupted; I learned early to watch my step. But footwear felt constricting, and it still does. I was that kid who only put on shoes when forced to do so, either by the weather or adults who didn’t understand why feeling the dirt between my toes mattered. This wasn’t a passing phase—I went without shoes as often as possible for most of my education, stopping only when I moved to Costa Rica at 25 (the danger of parasites changed the equation). My bare feet became a symbol of who I am: someone who wants to feel everything under my feet and around me—who does feel everything even when I don’t want to.

Somewhere along the way, I lost that barefoot girl and became overwhelmed by feeling everything. I’ve written books, published articles, facilitated workshops and given keynotes from center stage, but I’ve been struggling a little the whole time. A lot, actually. The louder the conversations get about education and the state of the world, the more I want to hole up in my nest and stop interacting with anyone, anything. Stop feeling any of it. And the louder the hateful rhetoric and attack on marginalized children and adults, the deeper I want to shove my head into the sand.

Today marks one year from the day I put Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership into the world, and a little over four years since Kapono and I released The Landscape Model of Learning. It’s hard to believe it’s been almost ten years since The Global Education Guidebook was published. But it was Taming the Turbulence that knocked the wind out of me—not just the writing, which required I reflect honestly on my own leadership skills and weaknesses, but the feeling of vulnerability that came with putting those weaknesses out there for everyone to see. 2025 raised my blood pressure, made my tremor unmanageable for the first time, and ripped something out of me that I’m still trying to make sense of. It left me feeling anxious and empty, not full and successful. Perhaps putting my heart out there for everyone to read was more than I was ready for.

In one of my favorite poems, Adrienne Rich describes one of her sisters dressing up as “the Transparent Lady / and all her nerves will be visible.” I knew exactly what she meant from the first read because it described me. Always vulnerable, always sensitive, all my nerve endings alert to every little feeling, from rotting fruit and bee stings to the dark side of the human experience. I recently heard Rosie O’Donnell describe her younger self sobbing over the tv news when a man kicked a woman off the stairs during evacuations from Vietnam. I was that child, too. I cried over my sister’s lost toys (not my own), over commercials for animal shelters, over the smallest injustices. And the bigger injustices—war in general and the Holocaust in particular—left me trembling with fury and pain for days. They still do. My therapist has me on a strict diet of 15 minutes of audio news a day because the visuals out of Gaza eviscerate me and I can’t get anything done with my heart in my throat.

I’ve tried to turn this empathy into my superpower the best I could. I’ve spent nearly four decades using that sensitivity to understand the needs of young people, to write in ways that might inspire equity, might foster better teachers and schools. I’ve tried to ignore the sensation that I’m always drowning and stay focused on being constructive, on doing something, however small, to improve the lives of learners and educators; on doing anything that might help create the world that ought to be, both inside the schoolhouse and beyond its walls. There is no such thing as a child who doesn’t deserve dignity and respect, who doesn’t deserve to feel safe at school. Only a bully with a superiority complex would say otherwise. But the more hateful and divisive the arguments become, the more I want to disappear.

I find myself craving a return to the barefoot girl, to that part of myself that was grounded in the dirt, that knew how to navigate the intensity of feeling everything by writing it. I was a writer before I was an educator; from the time I could hold a pencil, I wanted to move people, to capture real stories about real people doing their best. Today, I want to write about the incredible educators I’ve encountered in every corner of the planet. I want to capture moments when learners made me a better teacher, a better person, as I did recently in “But They’re Not Shooting at You.” I want to write to inspire a new generation of educators to join this agonizingly challenging and beautiful field, as I did in “Manifesto on a Life in Education.” I want to capture the magic of those moments only educators understand, when a learner grows and it feels like the earth is pulsing under our feet. Like the arc of history is bending toward something so much better.

I’ll keep facilitating and speaking because writing doesn’t keep a roof over my head, because most writers live below the poverty line as I do. And I’ll keep doing it because I love working with schools and conferences. I’m a little addicted to lighting sparks, to disrupting the status quo and helping teachers and leaders see their responsibilities through the eyes of children. When I keynoted in Switzerland last March, I was reminded of how beautiful it is to move and inspire hundreds of people at once—I’d love to do a lot more of that. But it may be a while before I write another book on pedagogy or instruction.

There is no single story for those of us whose hearts are tangled up with the lives of young people. Our stories are diverse and important, and I want to tell as many as I can. This isn’t a moment of reinvention. This is me returning to who I’ve always been and to what I’ve always known: that our stories are the only thing louder than the destruction, hatefulness and division boiling around us, that our stories can help us avoid being swallowed up by all of it.

And that my purpose is to tell them.