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Dear Professor Pain,
This letter is a bit awkward to write to you, but with the way my life has gone, I find it necessary. When I first met you, I had no idea you were a professor. I figured that there was not a single molecule of intellect in you. You seemed so careless, reckless, and even ruthless. Completely void of compassion, yes, that is what you were. In short, I hated you. I hated you from the moment I met you. Despicable and loathsome, nothing good could ever come from you so far as I was concerned. I thought you to be evil.
Yet, my thoughts betrayed me. As difficult as this is to say, I am going to say it. I am sorry. I was wrong to hate you. Sure, your presence caused me a terrific struggle, and I believed that anything causing me struggle must be evil, and thus to me, you were evil. Only now can I see how completely
mistaken I was.
You were not torturing me as I presumed, but rather you were teaching me. How could I see that I was rocky soil being tilled? How could I know that you prepared me like a farmer works his land? Only looking back do I see poor soil I was.
You never quit on me. For as many times as I tried to get rid of you, ignore you, and even kill you, there were many opportunities for you to quit on me. Yet your compassion for me was more fierce than my hatred for you. And to be sure, I did not know what you were doing to be anything resembling compassion. I believed it to be torture and boldly proclaimed my beliefs to anyone who would listen. What a paradox it is that something be defined as torture and compassion at the same time. Yet, the more compassionate you were in making me useable the more tortured I felt. The more you loved me, the more I thought you hated me.
How you treated me could only mean one thing to me at the time: hate. Now, Professor Pain, your presence in my life means something completely different, something so crucial and beneficial. Had you not educated me through challenge and struggle with your most unorthodox manner, had you not taught me with so much conviction, I would surely have been destroyed by now.
It is truly an irony. What I thought was destroying me at one time was the very thing that saved me from destruction later on in life. Professor Pain, I owe you my life.
I am sure this result is not as much a surprise to you as it is to me. So much of this revelation is still so new. Thank-you. I see now
the benefit of your unusual love.
Chris Gonzalez is a marriage and family therapist and freelance writer living in Jonesboro, Arkansas. He is married, with two children and has a masters degree in Marriage and Family Therapy and a bachelors degree in English Education and relentless
thirst to learn more.
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