I’m looking at the clock and SMARTbored—they’re both moving extremely fast. I’m worrying about what happened at lunch, all I think is to run out of the room. The sweat, clammy hands and twitching of my body is making a motion of panic. 

As soon as the teacher goes “time to work,” I rush up to him quickly but at a calm pace. 

All I said to him was “I need to go…”   As I rush down the north campus hallway of Arrowhead high school going into the room labeled Learning Center the numbers on the panel next to the door read 1 2 3 but I don’t even hesitate to look. 

      It’s my second week of school at the new campus. All I know is that I had to escape. As I burst through the door it is silent, quiet and peaceful. I do not feel any of those emotions. I rushed up to a lady I had only met three weeks ago. She sees the panic on my face.

 Mrs. Hassler the beautiful bright smile she once had turned into a straight face right away. Mrs. Hassler is my case manager for my dyslexia that I have been struggling with my whole life. I asked her “Can we please talk?” 

She rushes me to the side room we’re the teachers' desks are. 

I polo down at the chair right next to her desk, almost balling. I spew out the information that I have just witnessed from the lunch cafeteria with my old friends, in a jumble of words all in my head. Somehow she understands.     

      I finally told her everything. It was silent for 50 seconds before she sat down at her chair and started typing, asking me all of the details while also calming me down. I lost my best friend, boyfriend and friends all in the week before school. 

     I have had a rough school experience my whole life, jumping from school to school to try and find the right one without me getting bullied. I would tell teachers from those schools all around that what was happening to me isn’t right, how the kids treated me. I went there so many times that it started to become a chore. They started to think I was the problem. It was my fault.

      When I got to Arrowhead high school all I could think was “Oh god…here we go again.”  The first two years of high school were awful. That all changed when the sweet, loving, caring and nurturing Mrs. Hassler met me. She took my concerns, made them known, helped me with my issues, worked with me when I had trouble. 

       She was like a mother to me in that moment when I was having my panic attacks. I felt so special to her, like I was a kid of her own. The way she just listened and problem solved every issue I had. The way she would fight for me to have a better experience, I sit here in my junior year writing class, I think to myself, “who impacted me the most?” I had so many people to choose from but my brain kept going back to the one woman who made me have hope that I could be seen and heard as an adult rather than a problem.