IWSG February 2 Post

This is my second monthly post since joining the Insecure Writer's Support Group! I love this community I've joined and the support it provides!

The IWSG prompt this month was:  "Is there someone who supported or influenced you that perhaps isn't around anymore? Anyone you miss?"

My mind immediately goes to my fifth-grade teacher, and while she is still alive, and I've spoken to her many times since graduating the fifth grade, I won't be speaking to her anymore. Unfortunately, my identity as a nonbinary person with leftist political ideals is...quite the opposite of anything she'd approve of associating herself with, to put it nicely. So, while still "around" in the "alive" sense, she is no longer "around" in my life. I want to say that I miss her, miss what was taught to me when I was 10 years old, but, looking back, everything she taught me was clouded with that ultra-conservative cloud, everything was about her political "freedoms" in the classroom. Honestly, it's a wonder to me how many of us from that class turned out as liberal as we did, that woman really had us making fun of the one kid in the class that said he would've voted for Obama if he was old enough (this was the year after the 2012 election where Romney (a Mormon) lost to Obama, and we were a bunch of middle class, mostly white Mormon kids from the suburbs of Salt Lake City, Utah). I'm so ashamed of that past part of me but also enraged at the fact that an elementary school teacher had this much control over a bunch of 10 and 11-year-olds politically, and used it to bully the one student that wouldn't cave under her pressures.

After more thought, I went to my Latin/Psychology/Academic Decathlon teacher from high school. But I realized that we still keep in touch and I'll be seeing him on the Ides of March for my University's Ludi Romani (Roman Games) put on by the Classics Department here. (He happens to be an alumnus of my university as well) So he is definitely not gone. But I do miss his daily influence. I miss the absolute show-stopping quality he brought to every single lecture. I miss how much he cared about what I had to say, how much he wanted to see each and every one of us succeed at whatever it was that we wanted to do. He is the most creative person I've ever met, and I just hope that one day I can be just as unique, confident, and imaginative as he is, and have that same sort of positive influence on the people entrusted to me.