When my workshops or keynotes on bullying and incivility, which often take me on the road, are over, I usually spend my time travelling home writing. It is the only way that I can begin to make sense of what I am left holding.

Here when I am coasting, along the din of airport bar I float.  I ride. Filled with more questions than answers. I take in slivers of conversation around me while planes take off in my periphery.

I sip lattes to brace myself, spilling over with the secret hopes and hopelessness that have been given to me by the men and women who attended my workshops. Bullying. Incivility. Such seemingly benign topics that lead to conversations that alter me. Often times, the coordinators of the universities or companies that bring me back for follow up keynotes will hurriedly tell me “I know you can’t possibly remember this person or that person… who spoke during your keynote last time you were here—with all of the ten of thousands of people you speak to….but…..” And I smile. Because I do remember. Each and everyone, in some way. I remember everyone. One by one I unpack the memory of them, the variations to their regard, the many things each one shared or held back from verbalizing as they trembled.

For hours, sometimes days after I have left a city, they are all with me. And I am charged with deeper degrees of humility, of compassion, of gratitude, somehow as I recall them in slow motion. My commitment to my work intensifies in ways I did not know were possible, even after all of these years.

RENAISHA

Who was literally brought to me in tears, her face wet and shiny. She was lead into the room by another student who saw her being choked by a male friend on the main staircase in the student activity building, No one else intervened. As the student called me over to the threshold from where they stand I am puzzled.  I listen, as the student quietly explains to me why Renaisha will sob throughout my workshop, I lean over and ask Renaisha, if she would like for me contact campus administrator to whom she can report her assault, she vigorously shakes her head.  She will not report it.  I ask her if I can explain to the rest of the attendees who grow alarmed by her tears, why she is crying. She nods yes. She is happy that I am inviting the room of people to care.

BOB

With his blond hair and wide shoulders who does not say anything until I ask him about what bullying has meant to him in his own life. Bob who tells us, that he only stays in the basement, where his plumbing department is stationed.When I am him why, he tells us that he has grown up in a home with two mothers and caught hell because of it. It started in Kindergarten, he explains, and it never stopped. There were two years in elementary school where his teachers failed him because of it, left him back. He has changed schools more time than he can remember but it has always been the same…. He has three restraining orders out currently and there have been times when he comes home to still find a new cross staked on a front lawn of the home he still shares with his mothers. No one has ever spoken up for him. Now that he is in college he takes his classes in the basement and never visits any other floors before leaving.