∆Remember Us∆

*A Weekly Letter | Camigula Stephen*

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There is a particular frustration I carry that I have not yet fully named, not because I lack the words, but because I am not entirely sure the frustration belongs to me. It might belong to the vocation itself. To anyone who has ever stood at the threshold of another person’s becoming and understood, with that full and aching clarity, that they cannot cross it for them.

I am learning. I want to say that plainly, without apology but also without pretense. I am still inside the process I am attempting to describe. I haven’t arrived anywhere. What I have done is walked far enough down a particular road that I can recognize its texture beneath my feet, and more importantly, I can recognize when someone else is standing at the entrance to that same road, looking in, unsure whether the silence ahead of them is absence or invitation.

That distinction, between silence as emptiness and silence as depth, might be the whole of what I am trying to teach.

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Let me say what I actually believe, and let me say it without the softening that passes for humility but is often just evasion.

I believe you already have what you need. Not in the motivational-poster sense, not as a comfort handed out to keep you from panicking, but in the structural, almost architectural sense. The human being arrives pre-configured. Not determined, but oriented. The shape of what you are meant to become is not hidden from you arbitrarily; it is encoded in the very systems through which you experience being alive. Your body is not separate from your purpose. Your emotional patterns are not noise interrupting your thinking. They are the signal. They are the pulse.

The ancients understood this, even if they did not have our vocabulary for it. What we now describe through the language of gene expression, the way certain latencies awaken under certain conditions, the way environment and inheritance negotiate continuously in the production of a self, they understood as design. As the breath of God moving through matter until matter becomes capable of recognizing itself. I do not think these descriptions are in conflict. I think they are translations of the same astonishment, made in different centuries, in different registers of knowing.

What the genome carries is not just biological instruction. It carries something closer to archetype, a pre-formal shape that wants, under the right conditions, to emerge. And the emotions you feel, the pull you experience toward certain people, certain questions, certain kinds of beauty, these are not random. They are the instrument reading its own tuning. They are the self orienting toward the configuration it was always trying to reach.

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I think about this when I sit across from a young person who has been told, in a hundred subtle and unsubtle ways, that they are a problem. That their intensity is dysfunction, their deviation is failure, their refusal to fit is evidence of some deficiency within them. I have sat in those chairs myself, not always physically, but in the way that certain experiences leave their shape on you regardless of where your body was. And what I wanted then, what I still want, what I believe these kids need, is not to be fixed.

They need to be read correctly.

There is a difference between a person who is broken and a person who is being misread. Most of what gets labeled as the former is actually the latter. The frustration I carry, and here I am getting closer to naming it, is that the systems surrounding young people so often mistake the complexity of their signal for corruption of it. And then they bring in interventions, they bring in strategies, they bring in frameworks designed for a different frequency, and they wonder why the kid isn’t responding.

You cannot tune an instrument by ignoring what it is actually producing.

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So here is what I can offer, and here is what I cannot.

I cannot locate your keys for you. I want to be precise about this, not performatively humble but actually honest. The keys are yours. They open specific doors that are specific to you, and they were made in the image of your particular becoming, not mine. If I claimed otherwise, I would be doing what so many well-meaning people do: substituting my pattern for yours, my road for yours, my resolution for your question. That is not teaching. That is, at best, narration. At worst, it is a kind of colonization.

What I can do is show you my keys. I can hold them up in the light and say: look, this is the shape of one kind of opening. This is what it felt like when I finally stopped fighting the silence and let it mean something. This is where I went when the frustration of not-yet-knowing became unbearable, and this is what I found when I went there anyway. My keys don’t open your doors. But their shape might help you recognize the shape of what you’re holding.

I can offer clues. I can hold the lantern a little steadier at the entrance to the road so you can see that it is, in fact, a road, that others have walked it, that the silence ahead is not danger but depth, that the uncertainty you are standing in is not evidence that you are wrong but evidence that you are at the threshold of something real.

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Emotion is not decoration. I want to press on this because I think it is where a great deal of harm enters the conversation.

We have inherited, especially within institutions, especially within schools, a model of the human mind that treats feeling as the unreliable cousin of thinking. Emotion is what you manage, regulate, move past on your way toward rational processing. This is not only philosophically wrong; it is functionally catastrophic for the young people we are trying to reach, most of whom are experiencing themselves primarily through feeling and have been told, implicitly or explicitly, that this makes them less rigorous.

What if emotion is instead the primary mechanism through which the self navigates toward its own coherence? What if the pulse of feeling that moves through you, that draws you toward certain people, that aches in the presence of certain beauty, that rises in righteous anger when something violates what you know to be true, is not noise but signal? Not interruption but instruction?

I think about how gene expression functions, not as fixed decree but as dynamic response. The same genome produces different outcomes depending on environment, depending on what it encounters, what it is asked to do. And I think about how emotion functions similarly: not a static state but a relational frequency, a pulse that resonates differently depending on context and contact. The group, the community, the family, these are not just social structures. They are tuning environments. They shape which frequencies in you are amplified and which are dampened. Which parts of your configuration come forward and which remain latent.

This is why relationship is not soft. This is why belonging is not secondary. These are the conditions under which the self either becomes itself or doesn’t. And a school, a classroom, a teacher, these are not neutral. They are tuning environments. The question is only whether they are tuning consciously or by accident.

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Here is where I hold the frustration most fully: I am still learning to tune. I am learning, in real time, how to be the kind of presence that does not override the signal in front of me with my own. How to listen at the frequency of someone else’s becoming without translating it prematurely into my own terms. How to offer the clue without pretending it is the key.

And underneath that frustration is something I can only describe as reverence. Because what I am working with, in these young people, in this vocation, in the daily imprecision of trying to help someone become more fully themselves, is miraculous. Not as a word of comfort but as an accurate description. The complexity of what a human being is, the elaborate design underneath the ordinary face of a teenager who doesn’t know yet what they contain, I find this staggering in a way that has not diminished. If anything it has grown.

I think God understood time the way we understand memory, all of it present simultaneously, the future not absent but held. Our perception is secondary to that. We move through time the way we move through music: one note at a time, unable to hold the whole symphony in our ear at once, but able, if we are quiet enough, to feel the structure of it underneath what we can hear. Emotion is that structure. The pulse that carries the pattern of the whole into the moment of the particular.

And the young people I work with, they are, every one of them, carrying a pattern the world has not yet learned to read. My work is not to read it for them. My work is to sit with them in the not-yet-reading, and hold steady, and say: the silence is not an absence. Something is here. You are not alone in not yet knowing its name.

Keep burning through the uncertainty.

That is the fire that purifies.

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*Camigula Stephen writes weekly on consciousness, pedagogy, and the shape of becoming.*