I know I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Forgive me. I could not resist the way it opened out for me, ideas laid bare, memories sweet on my tongue, thoughts so present I could hold them in my hands. I want to hold them in my hands. Impatient, voracious, I bit into the sound of your voice, felt it give between my teeth. Licked fear from my lips. It tasted nascent, like possibility, like something.

This story is a part of my Hundred Word Stories project. This is story 11/100.

Each of us has one of the three classic flaws, but we’re not sure if the other two know this. We’re far from home, it seems. A rocky cliff leads into calm water. In the daytime, we take a boat out. We play music, that one song with the catchy electric opening and the falsetto at the end. Everywhere is gray and green and blue and brisk and foggy. Sweatshirts blur into moss, evening bleeds into dawn. We stay up so late. We lie down wherever.

Each of us is still awake, but we all think the others are asleep.

This story is a part of my Hundred Word Stories project. This is story 9/100.

This story is a part of my Hundred Word Stories project. This is story 7/100.

(Had to stick with (part of) the theme of last week’s post, I guess…)

In my dream, a woman stands on the street handing something out to the people who pass by. I approach, see the palm-sized cardboard boxes in her hand. “Do you work at a school?” she asks me. I tell her I do. She gives me a package containing three pills. “GLP-1 samples,” she says. “For your students.”

**

My mother has gotten into instagram. She’s never been much of a fan of social media, but she joined to look at a few yoga and architecture accounts. Now, she follows a family in the English countryside with their horses and chickens and dogs and children. We sit on the couch and she shows me the videos. The animals live in the house. Every place they go is strikingly beautiful. The youngest child rides a horse in an adapted saddle that holds him in a little basket. The dogs walk through the sunny grass and then lounge by the hearth.

Why doesn’t my life look like that? she asks me.

Ah, I say. You’ve discovered the fundamental problem of instagram.

**

The advertisements that play when I watch TV and listen to music are burrowing into my brain. I can recite most of the Capital One ads right along with them. I can identify a particular AI ad within the first second. I’m literally having dreams about weight loss drugs.

I recently read a short essay by Catherine Lacey where she connects the growing reliance on generative AI to the pressure or desire to get botox, referring to both as “Slickification.” She writes:

It’s no one’s job to tell other people what they should or shouldn’t do; I don’t have any interest in that. Instead, it feels increasingly urgent for anyone living under these forces of Slickification to develop a strong sense of what we believe and what guides our decisions to either use or avoid these “tools,” as they’re sometimes marketed. It is true I don’t want anyone to slickify their face, nor their prose, in an effort to reach some kind of generically “perfect” face or “perfect” sentences. What I wish is that the discussion around using LLMs [Large Language Models] and getting face paralyzing procedures to not be framed in terms of mere convenience, but rather in terms of opting out of nuance. Do you want to investigate your soul and really figure out what you, a human on planet earth, really have to say to other people or would you rather have the machine decide for you? Do you want your imperfect, decaying, wonderfully strange face to transmit its intricate and changeable emotions to other people or would you rather opt out of this gratifying, empathy deepening, absolutely ancient exchange for the sake of looking more like an Instagram-filtered version of yourself?

This essay was probably in the back of my mind as I found myself confronted by countless ads imploring me to use Grammarly AI and to get a prescription for Ro. Like Catherine Lacey, I don’t judge people for their personal decisions regarding either of these things. Or, perhaps—I don’t want to judge people. But I also don’t want the skill and practice of writing—and of teaching writing—to lose its value because there’s an easier alternative. I don’t want to be left behind, or looked down on, while everyone else takes advantage of all the new and exciting ways to change their appearance to conform to society’s standards of beauty.

In Charles Barkley’s iteration of the Ro ad, he says, “Guys, I’m on Ro, and I’ve lost 45 pounds. In fact, I’ve lost everything but my big mouth.”

I guess the point is the word big. But every time I hear that, I think, what? Is that supposed to be positive? You’ve lost everything? I mean, fine, lose the weight if you want. I don’t believe that that has any moral value, positive or negative. But don’t lose everything. Don’t lose your nuance, your wonderful strangeness, your empathy.

**

I was trying to write about the zeitgeist, the themes of the current moment—the things that everyone seems to be talking and writing about right now. Here we are. The age of artificial intelligence, the age of ozempic.1 I wonder if people are experiencing the same themes as I am. It’s hard to know what is “mainstream” when there are so many streams that one can be a part of, some of them intersecting and some running parallel to each other, and when so many media sources show you what they already think you want to see.

Instead I think I’m just writing about a feeling. What’s the feeling? Frustration? Envy? Concern? Irritation? Exhaustion? “I am a human being,” Catherine Lacey writes. “Our only destiny to be exhausted.”

**

The woman on instagram rides a dappled gray horse on a mountaintop while her dog gallops after her. The wind makes ripples in her white button-down shirt. The sky is exquisite. At home, her son feeds vegetable scraps to the horse in the kitchen while a chicken perches on the back of a chair.

My mother is getting recipe suggestions on her instagram feed. The food looks perfect. The English family bakes, too, one child mashing bananas, another cracking eggs. A third mixes the batter, holding it carefully out of reach of their horse’s nibbling lips. When it comes out of the oven, they sing about banana cake in their crisp British accents.

My mom looks on skeptically. How do I even know if any of this is real? she asks, and I say, You’ve discovered the other problem of instagram.

**

A lot of instagram influencers these days are trying to or claiming to be more vulnerable and real on their platforms. The matriarch of the English family posts an “insta vs. reality” post, where one video is her child serenely playing with wooden animal toys on the table and the other is her children frolicking and play fighting on a mountain in the gentle golden hour light and I cannot tell which video is claiming to be more “real” than the other. She has created, and curated, a beautiful life that I suspect is real, even if we’re not getting the whole picture. It’s not, specifically, a life that I want, so I can watch these videos and enjoy the escapism of seeing their home filled with light and exposed cobblestone walls and stylish outfits and gentle creatures.

Do you want to investigate your soul and really figure out what you, a human on planet earth, really have to say to other people or would you rather have the machine decide for you? I imagine the looks my students would give me if I asked them this. I think some of them really do want to figure out what they have to say, unaided by the lure and ease of ChatGPT. Some of them would argue that this is not what AI does for them, that it’s a way to help them access their own thoughts. Some of them would probably tell me that they’re not interested in investigating their soul—they just came here for a high school diploma. Do you want your imperfect, decaying, wonderfully strange face to transmit its intricate and changeable emotions to other people or would you rather opt out of this gratifying, empathy deepening, absolutely ancient exchange for the sake of looking more like an Instagram-filtered version of yourself? Well, I don’t know, yeah, sometimes maybe I would prefer to look more like the filtered version. But I don’t want to want that. But here we are.

Thank you for reading! More hundred word stories next week.

The stones lean on each other for support. There is no verdure here—just a garden of rusted metal and rotted rock. Paths twist between rows made of memorials to the past. The grass dries in clumps. Painted walls peel. Coins perch on the lifeless lithic surfaces and light lilts in patterns while down below, the layered dead gossip and groan. There is no more room, they say. Too much, they say.

Meanwhile, the stones are silent. Each year more are pushed up like so many crooked teeth.

This story is a part of my Hundred Word Stories project. This is story 5/100.

Leaning against the counter, we slip our fingers between sections, hear the sucking as the slivers part. Each one is made up of a hundred swelling teardrops. White pith gathers under my bitten nails. Anything that happens now might amaze me.

You squeeze the textured skin so the oils hit the flame, miniature stars in a dim kitchen.

This story is a part of my Hundred Word Stories project. This is story 3/100.

This story won 5th place in Tadpole Press’s November 100-word story contest! The theme of the contest was “truth-telling.” The truth: I forgot about that when I sent in this story because the contest I’d submitted to in the spring didn’t have a theme, but I guess they felt that it counted.

You can read a few of the winning entries online right now and thirty of them in their literary magazine at some point soon.

Later, in the dark outdoors, we lie on a discarded mattress and trade stories. Everyone thinks I’m secretive, I say, but really I think I just don’t have a lot of secrets to tell.

She says: Tell me what it’s like to be you in the world.

What counts as a secret?

Maybe this: years later, her words still echo in my head.

This story is a part of my Hundred Word Stories project. This is story 1/100.

I’m going to start sharing these stories here, but first, a few quick thoughts about fiction & nonfiction, and some disclaimers.

Every year, I ask my students to write memoirs. There’s a lot of flexibility in this assignment, and for students who don’t feel comfortable writing about themselves, I ask them to start with a detail about their life and write about a fictional character or experience that comes from that.1 (Next year I think I’ll introduce the term autofiction too.)

Of course, this is where most fiction comes from. But I’ve never been as good as I’d like to be at creating fictional situations that represent real feelings—at using “story truth,” at transposing a lived experience into an unfamiliar context. Recently I found something I wrote a few years ago that said “I think I am too selfish to write anything that’s not about myself and too afraid of vulnerability to write anything that is.” Maybe that’s where some of my writers’ block comes from, eh?

Over the summer, I set myself a challenge to write a hundred hundred-word stories. I’m less than halfway there, but I’m having a pretty good time with it.

Here are some things to know about the stories:

1. The stories are 100 words long, title included. When the stories are untitled, I will repeat the first few words as the title of the post.

2. I have “cheated” a bit in that some of the stories are interconnected and function as “chapters” of a larger narrative. I think they still mostly stand alone okay though.

3. I’ll be sending out the stories once a week, half of them to everyone and half of them to the paid subscriber category I have now created. This is mostly motivated by my feelings of vulnerability at having my writing exist where anyone can, in theory, see it. The subscription is $2/month.2 At the end of the year (or more frequently), I will add a contribution of my own and donate the money (some options I’m considering: the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund, Juntos, or Food Not Bombs). My other sporadic posts will still be sent out for free. I’ll see how all of this goes and feels and might make changes to how I do this in the future!

When you’re limited to one hundred words, it’s very easy to make the case that some things can be left unsaid. My point here is: a couple of these stories are pretty much just an account of something that’s happened. A decent number are complete fiction, based on a writing prompt or another piece of media. Many of them, though, are somewhere in the gap between reality and imagination. I like existing in this space, maybe because it provides a tenuous shield against the aforementioned vulnerability of choosing a side: autobiography as confession, fiction as choice.

Aaaanyway.3 Very short story-poem-fragment things coming soon! For now, forsythias & distant mountains.

There are plenty of horror stories out there about what happens when you try to use AI chatbots in place of actual mental health professionals. That said, an AI trained specifically to act as a therapist seems like it would be less likely to reinforce feelings of worthlessness, draft a suicide note, or encourage delusions and anxious reassurance-seeking. (Although—an AI chatbot designed specifically to help with eating disorder support did encourage users to lose weight with restrictive eating habits and body size tracking).

Still, I had no interest in discussing my life with an artificial intelligence app on my work phone. During the webinar training, the facilitators walked us through setting up your account, including choosing what voice and image your AI therapist would take on. The example they had pulled up on the screen was of a smiling, round-faced, white woman with shoulder-length blond hair. One of the other facilitators cut in, maybe noticing our staff’s overall demographics, and said, “I know a blond white woman might not resonate with everyone—there are other options.” I thought to myself, I’m not so concerned about this person’s race and gender and appearance, I’m more concerned about the fact that they are, well, not a person.

A little while ago, I discovered that googling myself on “AI mode” turns up a bunch of accurate information pulled directly from my LinkedIn or my workplace’s website, and a few completely irrelevant and untrue pieces of information. (It also yields quite a few results about Emmas and fires, since my last name (coincidentally) means “fire” or “burn” in Tagalog.) Among these pieces of false information: I write about my Hispanic heritage, specifically about making chiles rellenos; I was a competitor in the Scripps National Spelling Bee; and I have a son named Malik, born in late 2022, who features notably in my writing.

I tried googling some other people I know on AI mode, and while it mostly just cited their academic and professional accomplishments quoted from LinkedIn or other sources, occasionally this was supplemented with one or two completely fabricated pieces of information: it invented the plot of a writer friend’s novel-in-progress and gave another friend a significant acting career that doesn’t exist in real life.

Using the recommended questions that pop up after an initial search on AI mode, I had a brief chat with Gemini about my life, my writing, and Malik, my alleged son. We eventually got to:

Me, via suggested question: Does she discuss her son’s development on her Substack?

Gemini: Emma Sunog does not explicitly discuss her son Malik’s developmental milestones or traditional “parenting” updates on her Substack, Narrated. Instead, she incorporates her role as a mother into her broader themes of memory, storytelling, and daily life.

Based on her recent publications as of early 2026, her mentions of Malik focus on:

• Shared Moments: In a January 2026 post, she described finding “recovery and recuperation” during the winter by simply being present with him, using these quiet moments to recharge after a busy year.

• The Architecture of Memory: She uses her experiences as a mother to explore her central creative interest—the gap between an actual experience (the “trip”) and how it is later told as a story. Malik appears in these reflections as a participant in the “fragments” of her life that she is currently learning to write about publicly rather than “silently & alone

• Professional Identity: While she is a literacy educator who works with young adults at YouthBuild Philadelphia, her personal writing on Substack treats motherhood as one of several lenses through which she observes the world, alongside her interests in linguistics and art.

Extremely weird. Until this moment, I have not posted anything on my Substack in 2026, and I do not observe the world through the lens of motherhood, as I am not a mother.

I can’t decide whether I’m more irritated that someone looking me up might believe these untrue things about me or relieved that AI doesn’t actually know everything about me. Is it more unsettling when AI—or Google and the internet in general—seems to know all, or when it confidently lies? And I’m aware of the irony here: Google AI is clearly already using my Substack to try to answer questions about me, with its weird signature blend of direct quotes and absolutely made up facts; by posting this online, I’m offering up another source of information to comb for answers. I don’t love that. But I do wonder how this Substack post will influence what Gemini thinks it knows about me. (I’ve selected the option on Substack saying that my work can’t be used to train AI, at least.) If you are reading, Google: I do not have a child. I’ll search myself again in a couple of days and see if anything has changed.

It’s not like I was unaware that AI often simply makes things up. I’ve read about it, of course, and I’ve seen it happen—a few months ago, I asked my students to find and analyze examples of types of figurative language in the book we were reading, and a few students turned in work with quotes that did not appear in the book. I asked ChatGPT to do the assignment, and, sure enough, most of the quotes it gave me were relevant to the book’s topic but did not come directly from the text. When I pointed this out, ChatGPT agreed with me, explained that it had come up with “generic-ish” quotes about the subject matter, and then provided me with actual lines from the book.

No matter how many times I promise my students that I’d rather read three rough draft sentences that have come from their own brain than a page of polished information written by AI, there’s always someone who turns to ChatGPT. I find it incredibly frustrating. I asked students to do an assignment comparing a paragraph they had written to a paragraph written by AI responding to the same prompt, hoping they would see that while ChatGPT might be able to teach them something about where to put a comma or how to use a word they don’t know, it can’t reflect their ideas, opinions, or personal stories—all the things I am asking them to write about. But many students felt that the AI responses represented their feelings as well as or even better than they did themselves. “It said what I was thinking but couldn’t put into words,” one student said. “It said what I said but added more detail,” another explained.

(About an equal number of students told me they never use AI in school, because “it’s not always correct,” “I don’t know how to use it,” or “then I’m not learning anything.”)

I dislike AI. I’m afraid of its environmental impact, its potential for bias and harm, and the implications for the way we as humans work and think. In my opinion, the work that students produce without it is consistently much more compelling, original, and thoughtful. It’s a tool that my students have at their disposal, though, and I do believe that my job as a teacher includes helping students learn how to use these tools. As technology advances, certain skills become obsolete. I don’t use a physical dictionary in my classroom because students can use their phones to look up the meaning of a word, and I don’t particularly care that they don’t have experience using a print dictionary. Is AI comparable, or is it something else entirely? Recently a student was having some trouble with run-on sentences; when he asked ChatGPT to help him add periods to what he’d written (with my permission), it placed them correctly without changing any of his words. For this assignment, I cared more about my student’s self-expression and ability to coherently organize his ideas than I did about whether he left out a few pieces of punctuation. But my instinct tells me that it’s still important to teach punctuation, even if there exists a tool that can do that part for you. Even if that’s almost always the part of the assignment that I put the least emphasis on. Even if I know for a fact that some of my coworkers and peers—functional and intelligent adults with good jobs—are using ChatGPT to help them phrase or edit their emails.

I sometimes wonder what it was like to be a teacher before cellphones became ubiquitous; I can only imagine how much less class time was wasted telling students to put their phones away or repeating instructions because of divided attention. But I know my classroom is occasionally enriched by phone use as well: students scan QR codes to fill out forms, they enter answers for everyone to see in a word cloud on the board, they type their ideas faster on a phone than on a computer.

As it turns out, I have a coworker who participated in the Scripps National Spelling Bee and has a son named Malik. These facts are mentioned in her bio on our workplace’s website. We don’t resemble each other or have similar names, and we work in different departments of the school, so our bios aren’t near each other on the page. It’s a truly baffling mystery to me how these details about her life came to be associated with mine.

I’ll end this post with a request: if there’s anyone1 out there who understands how these search results came to be, please let me know. More importantly, if anyone has good strategies for teaching/teaching around AI, I’d love to hear them. And if AI ever reveals to you an unexpected offspring or career, I’d like to hear about that too.

I’ve decided to format this intro post as a Q&A/list of frequently asked questions. By frequently asked questions, I mean the questions that I have been frequently asking myself while trying to decide how I feel about starting a substack.

Why did you start a substack?

One day in November, I started writing about something that happened at work and I decided somewhat impulsively that I would like to post it somewhere. (At the time, I had no substack followers and told no one.) I write fragments like this occasionally that often feel like they have the potential to be made into actual essays but don’t really stand on their own that well. Of course, most of these fragments just sit on my computer and I never get around to developing them into something more. But I figured that this could be a place for them. I want to encourage myself to do more short-form, low-stakes writing and to remind myself that writing doesn’t have to be something I do silently & alone that stays on a document on my computer that no one ever sees.

Why is it called Narrated?

Well, it was originally called “The Word and the World,” a reference to Paulo Freire, but I was pretty sure that the immediate association with this phrase would be religious to most people outside of the literacy education world, so I changed it. I really was not sure what to call it and I still am not. I wanted to capture a little bit of the connection and the divide between an experience and the storytelling of an experience. As Lorrie Moore says, “How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things.”

Why did you want the name of your substack to capture the connection and the divide between an experience and the storytelling of the experience? Is that what your substack posts are going to be about?

Great question. Maybe some of them. Not sure.

What will this substack be about?

Apparently, it will be about teaching, writing, memory, etc. I like to write about writing (or language more broadly) and about memory (specifically about memories, and about memory as, I don’t know, a concept), and teaching is what takes up most of my time and my mental energy, so I imagine that this will end up being mostly accurate. I reserve the right to deviate from this tagline and/or change the tagline, though I left that “etc.” on there to cover all my bases. I do have some ideas for potentially posting a few old essays and very short fiction at some point.

How often will you post?

This is also pretty much TBD. Part of me wants to treat this as Official and come up with a Schedule and hold myself to following it, but most of me knows that it will probably just end up being whenever I feel like it.

What if you run out of things to say? Isn’t this pretty self-indulgent—writing about your life and assuming other people might want to read it? What’s the point of this, really?

The most frequently asked questions of them all! It’s okay, though; I’m not forcing anyone to read this, there are no consequences if I stop posting, and I myself love reading thoughts from my friends or parasocial friends/admired public figures.

Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoy!

Some Notes:

The Lorrie Moore quote is from the short story “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk,” a title that I deemed too unwieldy to cite within the text above.

The title Narrated is slightly inspired by one of the substacks I follow, Related by Rhaina Cohen.

The title of this post is a phrase that one of my high school friends used to say whenever someone asked a rhetorical or deep or silly question. There’s a memory for you.

I met a friend at a neighborhood Hanukkah candle lighting near where we live. I was running late from work; I parked my car and ran the two blocks to where fifty or so people were gathered under a covered archway lined with string lights. The weather was cool but not biting, and the recent snow had mostly melted. I got there just in time to sing the blessings over the candles.

After lighting the menorah, they started playing a raucous version of the dreidel song and people danced a little and my friend and I ate sufganiyot and went to inspect the menorah, which was burning oil but also seemed to be plugged into something. Multiple sets of children were wearing the same menorah-printed pajama bottoms. There was a giant plastic dreidel filled with more plastic dreidels; you could submit your estimate of how many there were to potentially win a prize. My friend and I observed the crowd for a little while. Then we went to her house and ate latkes that she’d made while listening to her Hanukkah playlist.

I really like Hanukkah. I like to light candles in my house and I like the melodies of the blessings. When I was a kid we used to have so many menorahs, and on the last night we’d often light them all—all those little flames flickering shadows against the wall.

When I found my friend, halfway through singing the first blessing, and settled into my spot next to her at the back of the small crowd, I noticed there were police cars parked on either side of the street, and four police officers stationed behind everyone, and it took me a moment to process that they were there as security for us.

A funny thing about getting older while the world changes is that sometimes I’m not sure how much of what feels new to me (culturally, or politically, or even logistically) is actually new and how much of it just feels different now that I’m an adult. Or, on the flip side, what feels normal to me but is actually new in the scope of the world. I had been on planes before 9/11, but I don’t remember what airport security was like when I was six. I know that that was a turning point—and not just for the TSA—because I have been told. I wonder what other turning points we are living through (I can think of a few), and when we’ll realize that they are turning points, and what will become normal for the next generation.

I have a coworker who told me last year that she doesn’t vote because she was raised Jehovah’s Witness and they don’t vote, and even though she’s not practicing anymore she thinks it would feel too weird, and I said oh, wow, that’s interesting, but what I thought was, well, that’s fucking stupid.

We live in a swing state. The week before any major election, the amount of texts I get about the candidates piles up until it hides any messages from my actual friends. I don’t respond to them, but I don’t delete them either. My mailbox becomes stuffed with flyers for all candidates. Last October, I stopped answering calls from any unknown numbers, and then when I began making my own calls to voters I started answering again, because I knew how disheartening it was to get voicemail after hang up after voicemail.

At work last year, the day after the election, it felt like there was a thick blanket covering me. I had a lot of students who voted last year for the first time. Most of them didn’t vote for the winning candidate. Some of them did. A few weeks before the election, a male student said Kamala Harris can’t be president, she’ll get her period and start a war. I felt tense with rage. It’s an idiotic take. But I can’t say that to a student. But it’s deeply misogynistic. But he was probably only taught to think that way by the people he grew up with. But it’s wrong and it’s dangerous. But I often have trouble knowing how to correct harmful opinions without shutting students down.

The thing is, I like and admire the coworker who doesn’t vote. I think we share a lot of beliefs, and she’s incredibly good at her job. This year at school, I overheard two male students talking about how much they hated the current president, and when I asked them if there were any politicians they did like, they named Kamala Harris and Zohran Mamdani.

My parents asked me, after the election, if my passport was up to date. My mother always said that you should always have a current passport, my own mother told me. The Holocaust is in their blood. My dad’s parents survived it; my mom’s mom narrowly escaped it. This means it’s in my blood, too. But I can’t feel it like they can—a day when another country might feel like more of a viable home than this one.

At the candle lighting, after the boisterous dreidel song, they started playing songs in Hebrew: “Ma’oz Tsur” and “Yemei HaHanukkah.” As always when I hear Hebrew songs, the words came into my head from some hidden place in my memory. I don’t know what they mean, if I ever did. But the sounds are there. So that, at least, is something I have in my bones.

When I was twelve, I wrote a play about three girls who got transported to a magical world where they were forced to confront their specific individual fears in order to find their way back home. The play was to be performed at Thanksgiving with me and my two oldest friends—Tracey and Coco, twins I’ve known since I was an infant—in the starring roles as the three girls, and my younger brother slightly typecast in the non-speaking role of one of the character’s younger brothers. We performed the first act for our parents in the large upstairs room of Tracey and Coco’s house, with plans to put on the rest later.

The play was called Lapis Lazuli, because each of the three main characters had an item with that gemstone on it that turned out to be magical. It included references to Dora the Explorer and to Shakespeare. It drew awkwardly direct inspiration from people I knew in real life. There was one particularly nonsensical subplot in which Coco’s farsighted father accidentally took Penicillin instead of Advil out of the cabinet to give to his son, who was allergic to Penicillin. (After a brief (offstage) stint in the hospital, he was fine.)

I remember writing this play. I was in the kitchen of the house I lived in until I was thirteen, typing on the computer. When I was about halfway through writing the script, I called Tracey and Coco to tell them excitedly about my idea. Since I was the playwright, I decided to give them larger roles in order to balance out our involvement in the project, so they were each double cast as both two of the main trio and also the magical creatures in the world that we visited, which would have proven logistically challenging if we’d ever attempted to perform anything beyond that first act. The finished product was fifty-seven pages long.

We still do Thanksgiving with Tracey and Coco’s family. This year, nearly two decades after the play’s initial debut, we decided to do a table read of the script. In addition to the original four cast members, some other family and friends got involved (including one who is an actor by profession and another who most of us were meeting for the first time).

At dinner, at the “kids’ table” (guests ages sixteen to thirty one), I explained the plot of the script to the new participants. Each of the three main characters had a challenge in their life and a lesson they needed to learn that was taught to them somewhat heavy-handedly by the magical creatures/experiences in the Lapis Lazuli world. This was pretty much par for the course when it came to my imagination and my writing at the time. Tracey, Coco, and I played a lot of pretend games about three magical girls when we were kids, and I drew writing inspiration—either direct or tangential—from many of them. In my written versions, our characters followed similar patterns every time: one was soft and easygoing, one sharp and cagey, and one—my character—was somewhere in the middle. I don’t think I saw us that way when it came to our real life personalities. But in fictional universes, I always cast myself as the in-between, the peacekeeper.

This year’s Thanksgiving contained more throwbacks and reminiscing than just the play reading. It was also the first Thanksgiving at my parents’ new house, two hundred miles west of the one where I stayed up late typing a play script for me and my friends. Any event that repeats itself every year invites comparisons/nostalgia/looking back, I think. I’ve participated in enough family Thanksgivings that I can track the patterns and pick out the differences.

I’m a backward-looking person by nature, anyway, so I’m always thinking about the past and how it compares to the now. I’m thinking about the delight with which writing a fifty-seven page script came to me at age twelve, and the second-guessing that accompanies an eight hundred word essay at age thirty-one. I’m thinking about how much I loved to play pretend as a kid, and how writing and play were so intertwined, one just an extension of the other into words on the page. When I decided to make my character the even-keeled and set-apart one, I was both reflecting something I felt and imagining a role for myself that I wanted. In some ways, my character in Lapis Lazuli was the least interesting. But I did give her the last line of the play.

When we were talking about the play, Tracey mentioned something that the author Jennifer Finney Boylan once said at a talk: that showing people your nonfiction writing is an emotional risk because it’s about your real life, but showing people your fiction is even more vulnerable, because everything that happens in it is something you came up with on your own, a decision you made. We sometimes think of fiction writing as a defense, a way to dissemble a bit, but really it’s just laying your entire mind bare.

With that in mind, I give you the final scene of the play. I’ll let you decide which piece of writing, in this instance, is the more vulnerable one.

One of my students got maced outside of school today.

It was right after dismissal. I was washing my hands in the bathroom when another teacher came in followed by a student, her eyes squeezed shut, arms out in front of her to feel her way. “Where am I now?” she was saying.

The teacher ran water onto her eyes. Over the course of the next five minutes, three different staff members showed up with bottles of milk. Two more staff members came into the bathroom, helped the student out of her school-branded shirt and her tank top, and supported her while she crouched facing away from the sink, head tipped back over it while they poured milk on her face. “It feels like I’m drowning,” she said, streaks of milk running into her hair and down her stomach. “Why does it feel like I’m drowning?”

In context, I guess worse things have happened to my students. This year alone, one student was shot a few blocks away from school during lunch, one was shot over a weekend, and one alum from last year was killed.

The student who got maced recovered physically within ten minutes or so. I don’t know her well. I hovered by the door to the bathroom, getting paper towels and people’s phones as requested. I watched her swing between anger—cursing out the person who had hurt her, punching the door to the bathroom stall, screaming that she hated everyone who was involved and was going to get them back—and exhaustion, half-crying, saying she just wanted to go home.

An hour or two before this, in my classroom, my students and I were talking about revenge. We recently finished reading Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds, a book that talks about the cycle of violence and and asks: is getting revenge worth it? I won’t spoil the ending, but while I believe that the book ultimately lands on the answer no, the story is ambiguous enough that my students interpret it in different ways.

When we’re talking about revenge in class, I want to tell the students who believe that it’s worth it: don’t you see how that can only make things worse? Don’t you see that when you’ve been wronged, the only way to stop the cycle and end the harm is to respond with indifference, dignity, or even empathy?

But when my students are experiencing injustice or pain, when they’re too caught up in their feelings to be logical, I can only ask myself: if I tell this person that not every action needs a reaction, where is all of this hurt and anger supposed to go?

I’m taking a class right now about social-emotional learning. I’m not finding it particularly helpful. We’re talking about how to do research on the best SEL curriculum for your setting. We’re evaluating how authentically our schools partner with students’ families and communities. We did one reading about positive behavior supports. Nothing we’ve done has given me any guidance on how to help a young adult who has just been physically harmed due to social conflict manage her emotions, decide not to escalate the situation, feel okay again.

Maybe there’s no way to learn that in a class. Maybe I just need practice. Maybe the rest of my colleagues feel just as paralyzed as I do, wanting to offer both comfort and advice, unsure of how to do either.

I’m not the kind of person to get into drama, she kept saying. It’s only because of—she named some other students who had gotten her caught up in a situation. I was fine when I was just on my own, she said.

I don’t want the lesson she takes away from this to be: I’m better off if I’m just on my own.

When the dust settled, and the student was wearing a shirt free of mace or milk and was safely having a conversation with her advisor, I went back to my classroom. I continued to input my grades for the day. In the end, that’s my job. And maybe I am a little more generous with grades on the days when I’m reminded of the effort that it takes so many of my students just to walk in the door each day. And maybe that’s just doing them a disservice. I honestly don’t know. I’ll think about it more tomorrow.

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