I lost my job at the college today.

I knew it was coming. I’ve known this for a while. It’s the pandemic. People are dying and laying low, and the state is broke.

Suck it up, buttercup. You don’t exist in a vacuum.

Last year a classmate told me to let go and get out of this place while everything was still lovely. That if I stayed here too long, the beautiful things about this place and the happiest memories would begin to go sour and stale. She said that if you stay too long in a place you love, you’ll end up being forced to leave, or leaving willingly because you don’t like it there anymore.

Right now, I’m –

I wasn’t sure how this was going to turn out. I’ve thought that my time here was unraveling and shifting and changing and going to end so many times.

And each time that things have changed so much that I’ve thought it could never be the same, I’ve been wrong.

Friends come and go, and chemistry in a group changes. The physical space changes, moves around. Leadership is passed from person to person. Administration does its thing. The ridiculously draining things about this kind of work take their toll. Imposter syndrome comes and goes. I learn, and grow, and I am constantly II becoming.

And I keep finding myself in a new incarnation of an old familiar spirit of a place.

When I started working in the math center we were located in a big room in the corner of the third floor of the library. There were whiteboards on the walls, and there was this perpetually-stoned-looking gremlin in a purple sweatshirt, and there were plants all over the place, and there was a safe-zone T-shirt and there was a bookshelf with a go board on the top shelf and there were old math textbooks and they were a mess, and it was excellent.

I think the first time I went to visit that room for help there was a small group of people in the corner and they were laughing and I think they were talking about snakes, and I was fairly sure that I was nowhere near cool enough to go up to those people and talk to them.

And then somehow I ended up working alongside some of those people, and laughing with them, and loving pretty much all of them and I don’t think most of them will ever actually know how much.

This job has taught me how to go up to strangers and talk to them and ask them how I could help. And that turned out to be easy next to learning how to admit when I didn’t know what I was doing, how to reach out and ask for help, how to listen, how to become more accepting and nonjudgmental than anyone had ever required me to be, how to read body language and communicate with silence, how to coax people into being self directed without them noticing it was happening and how to take someone from feeling confused to feeling like they were finally starting to understand.

Those fifteen weeks of that first semester changed who I am as a person. Those fifteen weeks are untouchable.

I have absolutely had moments of feeling useless because I didn’t understand or couldn’t remember how to do the things that people came to me for help with. I have had moments of feeling useless because even after I tried everything I could think of, my students didn’t seem to understand.

But I don’t think those moments of feeling useless negate everything I’ve learned from working here, or the moments when I believe I have been able to help.

I’m glad beyond words that I was able to be working in the math center when the pandemic happened. I’m honored to have been here to help, even in the moments when I knew that there was nothing I could do. I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else, or with any other group of people.

In all the weeks of working remotely, I only helped one student. His computer didn’t have a working microphone, so we had to get creative about how to work together.

He kept coming back until the end.

I always knew my time here was finite. But I wanted this place to be a haven for the nerds who needed somewhere to go for a long time after I was gone, after all of us had gone. In this moment, I’m wondering if it will be. I’m a little frightened.

But I’ve seen her change so many times.

I wonder who she’s becoming next.