She swallows the words, they say, one large pill at a time; they explode inside her, light up her organs. Her crucifixion is not public. It is a private affair, inside her guest bedroom. Her mind and body are the audience. In the dark, she recollects what she was doing that October day she  designed a story about etymology. It felt powerful. She had felt ready. 

She was wrong. 

There was power, she thought, in the storytelling. Though, it was not hers to tell. There was readiness, but no one could see it from her spot in front of the class. 

The girl. 

Shanice will haunt every corner of this designer’s mind. The girl. Was. Not. Okay. This story, this lesson brought back every cut Shanice had experienced with the word. The n-word repeated each time was a new slice reopening old flesh wounds. Old blood stained her desk, her book, her notebook. There was pain, trauma, violence. The teacher-designer was violent, and left a violent story for Shanice to read by herself. Shanice read the story featuring the history of the n-word. The story in which the word was written over and over, each repetition a slice into an existing wound for Shanice. This teacher was violent, not there to protect Shanice with trust and warmth. She left Shanice, a twelve year old, to face demons without the skills to fight them that cold January day. And so, these truths masked as pills pierce the lining of this teacher’s stomach; they only detonate once inside. 

This woman of color. Activist. Truth teller. Confronter of violence in the English language is also a (teenage) girl on her knees, flooding her empty room with salty tears. She is also a human who innovates. She leads. She brings others to the fountain of inquiry where they have to face their demons: past and present. They have to find their inner dragons to fight these demogorgons who have taken residence in their bodies, sucking them of the ability to see straight. Because true anti racist work is being able to see through the glass walls of pain from the past and loving yourself enough to know that this is not about that. The past is not the present. The old pain, though it bleeds like new pain, is not new pain. That accumulated impact is the glaucoma of our judgment. It makes it so we cannot see the facts, only feel the past feelings. So it is up to the Shanices of this world to see through the pain and still grow. It is not fair. The teacher knows this and still gently tugs her and her and her toward the raw, pricking truth.

When the teacher drops these truth pills that dissolve into the bodies of her patients and bring up for them their past encounters with the word, her patients turn on her. They riot in this wing of the hospital of anti-racism. They try to burn her office down with her inside. 

From the ashes of this space, she walks toward the truth. With the scars of her private crucifixion, she walks hand in hand with candor: an inventor who will continue to create pathways for her patients to see the systems that perpetuate this racist society.