In 1997, there was one person in my life, thanks to whom I started to think that it was okay to be myself. Of course, it is only now, decades later, that I realise that this was an important starting point. But thanks to this person I went to study mathematics, thanks to this person I didn’t start missing school for no reason and I didn’t carry out a horrible idea I had in my head, but luckily I was too scared to carry it out.
I haven’t really told anyone that much about it, that it was really so crazy in my teenage head (I had to be a good boy and a good girl, to be a role model for everyone else, to get more of that “Ivar is a good boy!” stuff.) to be heard, to suppress feelings). But many of us go through difficult periods in our lives, and at that moment, someone’s sentence, post, word or simply being there can become important. Maybe it will also support someone else at different stages of their life. Either directly supportive, or so irritating that I want to silence, block, etc., because they reflect something I don’t want to see. My own reaction to similar public statements of vulnerability used to be similar: “Want attention? Omnipotent!”.
It’s also an important part of the journey, when you start to notice that something is bugging you about others. I share these thoughts openly because it’s okay when things go wrong in life (by the way, a great therapy is to listen to the Full of Shit podcast every week) and we talk about them and we are vulnerable, open.
If we are not, there is little you can do with that beautifully anointed, glossed-over ego bumper, and you will have the experiences again and again that will drive you out of line. While you learn. Just notice and appreciate the people who have let a very big part of you come out, that you’ve otherwise been afraid of.
There are many, many more, but the positive influence my maths teacher had on my life at the time. He stood up for me in a bullying situation in class when I was answering a homework question in front of the class and was being mocked for my body and hair, and this 14-year-old boy formed the clear conviction in his head that good people are maths teachers.
Later in life, I found out that you don’t really need to be a maths teacher to be a good person, and as a result of becoming a maths teacher, I still didn’t make it to the front of the class. Perhaps my desire to become a maths teacher was more because it would teach me to be a good person…. in fact, there were still formulas and theorems and some hitherto unknown concepts that did not directly describe the formula for goodness.
Thanks in large part to a different and unpopular career choice, I later (including professionally) gained the very experiences without which I would not today be doing 100% of the things I want to do in life – developing myself, supporting others in their development as a leader or simply as a human being. Thanks to this, I also made friends who, at that time and later, were in the right place at the right time or needed me.
I’ve been in contact with schools and teachers lately, and I see how much of their soul many teachers put into their work. It’s Teachers’ Day soon, but I think every day is Teachers’ Day. After all, we learn something from teachers every day. Whatever and whoever that teacher is. As a teacher myself, my goal is always to help people grow beyond a specific subject (in my case, leadership). Discovering something new in yourself, or becoming aware of something that has been eroding the foundations of your life for a long time, and finding it out is a great start to healing.
Picture from the beginning of 2019 with my maths teacher Meigas.
