My Why
Last week I delivered staff training on a relational and trauma-informed approach in schools, weaving together ideas from the Neurosequential Model, Polyvagal Theory, Window of Tolerance, and Zones of Regulation. Afterwards, I caught myself being critical, replaying all the things I didn’t say—until a colleague reminded me that my passion shone through and it was very impactful. And they were right. This work isn’t just a passion for me—it feels like my purpose. That realisation brought back a flood of memories, and today I want to share one of the stories that shaped why this work matters so much to me.
The Demon Headmaster — and the Amazing Mum-Teacher:
When I try to pin down the exact moment my purpose formed, two figures always appear in the same frame: my mum — the passionate teacher who smelled of ink and evening wine — and the small, fierce girl I once was, blinking under the glare of a very different kind of adult.
My mum was a primary school teacher. To every adult I asked about her, the answer was the same: she was brilliant. I spent childhood afternoons trailing through the schools where she worked, greeted by children who clung to her like a favourite storybook. She loved words — literature, poetry, theatre — and dragged us to London art galleries, quoting Shakespeare on the way home as if it were part of the soundtrack of life. She fed my imagination; she coaxed my creativity into light.
She also carried her own quietly desperate strategies for surviving stress. Wine became the companion that helped her through the days — and like many companions, it stayed too long. That addiction eventually cost her life. She wasn’t perfect. None of us are. But she believed in me, and believing is a powerful inheritance.
I spent my own primary years in a tiny countryside school in Compton with the sort of freedom that leaves a person with thick roots and a wandering eye. I don’t remember many lessons — I remember the window, the fields beyond it, and how often I escaped to run on that grass as if air itself could chase away boredom.
As my daughter recently started ‘year seven’, I find myself reflecting on my first year of senior school. My first day at Portsmouth High, I felt like the heroine of a Malory Towers book: nervous, buoyant, clutching the small intimacies of new friendship. Annie — shy, pale, and kind — sat beside me in assembly. Behind us, older girls towered like a different planet. On stage, the deputy headmaster prowled through his speech. He was small and wiry, with thinning sandy hair and a bald patch like a map of something sinister. At some point he snapped and pointed towards us.
“YOU! You’ve been chatting and being silly this whole time. See me at the end.”
Annie flushed crimson and began to cry. My stomach dropped — it had been me talking excitedly to her. Loyalty, a trait within me, rose up like a shield. I put my hand up. “It wasn’t her,” I said. “It was me.”
He glared. I had embarrassed him in-front of a hall of girls and women. “YOU see me at the end then.”
That sentence — the casual, institutional pronouncement — became the beat of my first year. Every break, I trudged to his office. He was the kind of man who stood uncomfortably close; when I stepped back he stepped forward, reclaiming the space. He would sit at his desk and make me sit opposite in a silence that felt like interrogation, sometimes he just stared at me with a strange look on his face, and sometimes he pretended to do paperwork while frequently glancing up at me. Each time he told me the same thing: my teachers had confirmed I had behaviour problems; I should come back tomorrow.
A year of this shapes you. I learned how small a person can feel inside a big room. I learned to feel helpless around adults who knew what was happening- the briefest reflection of pity in a receptionist’s eyes — a look that offered nothing. The school’s reports from that time read like a litany: Jessica does not pay attention. Jessica has a bad attitude. I had a dyslexia assessment; ADHD and neurodivergence were not really part of the conversation back then. I was struggling, and the system labeled me as bad instead of seeing me.
The teachers of art and PE were my island. My PE teacher saw a potential I didn’t recognise in myself and pushed me toward competitive sport; I loved her for trying but there wasn’t a competitive bone in my body. But it was my art teacher who truly saw me — my messy thinking, the way I pictured things differently. He fed my talent with encouragement, and for the first time school felt less like a place that punished and more like a place I could enjoy learning.
I told my mum again and again that the deputy headmaster was picking on me. At first she didn’t believe it. “Teachers don’t pick on children,” she said — and I wanted to prove otherwise. By the end of the year I was withdrawn, depressed, and self-harming. That frightened her into action. She asked for a meeting. I do not know what passed behind closed doors, only the moment she came out and told me, quietly and fiercely, “You never have to set foot in that school again. We are moving you.”
Relief is a strange, tangible thing. I remember breathing like someone who has been underwater for too long. To be believed. To have my witness. To have my perpetrator held in the light of someone else’s attention. That day is a hinge in my life.
That hinge is my why.
I refuse to let a child feel helpless in a classroom full of adults. I refuse to let pleading eyes go unnoticed. I want to build the kind of school space I craved — safe, nurturing, able to recognise the gifts hidden in a restless child. After years of professional training and my own therapy, I work in the place I once feared: schools. I help children who learn differently, who fidget, who draw during lessons. I get to be the adult who looks, asks, listens, and changes course.
There is purpose in this work that fills the holes left by my own schooling. I am not only a teacher or a therapist; I’m the grown-up who remembers the sticky, small voice that said, “It wasn’t her.” I’m the person who will stand by office doors for anyone who needs to be seen. I love my job — not because it’s easy, but because it undoes what once felt unfixable.
Some days I think of my mum: the theatre of her teaching, the warmth of her encouragement, and the ways she faltered. I think of Annie, wherever she is. I think of the art teacher who fed my creativity when no one else could. All of them are in this work with me. Every time a child is believed and moved, a small, fierce joy returns to me — and there, quietly and fiercely, is the reason I do what I do.
✨ A Little Note on Privacy
To keep things safe and respectful, I’ve changed names and certain details when I write about people or situations here. This way, the stories can be shared without revealing anyone’s personal identity.