Word: Witness

Sentence:

To witness someone is to see what they are carrying, even when you cannot take it away.

Passage:

Early in my teaching career, I do not think I understood how much of the work would simply be witnessing what young people were carrying.

I was young and pretty green. I had grown up in the South with limited exposure to some of the pain and instability my students were experiencing. They would tell me stories about violence, addiction, housing problems, taking care of younger siblings, or things happening at home that I had no idea how to respond to.

My instinct was usually to help. Fix something. Find a resource. Give advice. Get them back on track.

I had not yet learned that sometimes people are not asking you to fix what happened. Sometimes they just need someone willing to see it.

As I moved into school leadership, I was trusted with even more of those stories. Students told me things. Parents told me things. Teachers would close the door and tell me what they were carrying too. The closer I got to people, the more I understood that everyone was walking into the building with a life that did not stop when they came through the doors.

Then I started losing students.

There were funeral homes, grieving families, empty seats, and young people trying to understand why their friend was suddenly gone. I remember feeling helpless because there was nothing I could say that would make a parent’s loss less painful or make a student’s grief disappear.

I wanted to do something. Leaders are conditioned to respond, solve, and make a plan. But grief does not work that way.

I had to learn that sometimes being there was the work.

Sitting with a family. Listening to a student. Giving a teacher space to fall apart for a minute. Saying someone’s name. Acknowledging that something terrible had happened and not rushing everyone toward the next thing.

Years later, when I was working at the district level, I helped create a School Leaders Care Team. Suddenly I was hearing these stories from across the city. School leaders were losing students and staff members and then trying to figure out how to care for an entire community while grieving themselves.

By then, I knew some of that feeling.

What struck me was how often the leader became the person everyone looked toward while very few people were asking what the leader was carrying. So part of our work was simply creating a place where they could tell the story. Where they did not have to be the strong one for a few minutes. Where someone else could witness what the experience had done to them.

We live in a world that moves quickly. Another story replaces the last one. Another crisis appears. Another email arrives. Life keeps moving even when someone else’s life has stopped for a moment.

Witnessing asks something different of us. It asks us to slow down enough to notice another person’s journey without assuming it has to look like ours. We may not have experienced the same loss, disappointment, divorce, illness, job change, or heartbreak, but most of us know something about grief. Most of us know what it feels like to carry something we wish someone else could see.

I used to think helping meant having an answer.

Now I think sometimes helping begins by being willing to stay close enough to witness the question, the pain, or the story before trying to do anything with it.

Maybe that is why being witnessed matters so much. Sometimes we do not need someone to fix the road we are walking.

We just need to know we are not walking it unseen and alone.

Your Turn:

Who in your life might need you to witness what they are carrying before you try to fix it?

A quick thank you to everyone who has commented, emailed, or reached out to let me know that one of these little sparks meant something to you. I try to respond to every person who takes the time to share. If you have not already, feel free to visit the website, read through the comments, and add your own voice to the conversation. I always appreciate hearing what a word brings up for you.

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