They Helped Me Save My Own Life - Introducing BK5 Coach Kitty Smith

They Helped Me Save My Own Life

How education, social services, and human connection changed what was possible for me

By: Kitty Smith

At my mother’s funeral, I didn’t know how to grieve.

I was eleven years old, running amok through the funeral home, screaming, stomping, and

eating spoonfuls of sugar straight from the bowl. My dad finally grabbed me by the shoulders

and yelled, “What is wrong with you?” I didn’t have an answer.

I know now that there was nothing wrong with me. I was an eleven-year-old whose mother was

dead, whose nervous system was completely overwhelmed, and who had absolutely no idea

what to do with all that grief. But I didn't have that language then.

I wandered away and ran face-first into the soft potbelly of one of my tias. Two women looked

down at me with those sad faces adults make when something terrible has happened to a child

and there are no words big enough to fix it.

One touched my cheek.

“God is preparing you for something in this life, mija.”

I had no idea what she meant.

Nearly three decades later, I found myself standing in front of more than two hundred people at

a holiday production of Drag Church, an event I created after a little pop-up art show somehow

grew into something much larger.

I asked everyone in the room to rub their hands together. We imagined gathering our energy

between our palms. I watched hundreds of hands rise into the air, sending that energy out into

the room and toward one another. Standing there, looking at this community that had gathered

around something I had dreamed into existence, I thought about those words again. God is

preparing you for something.

My understanding of God has changed considerably since I was eleven. These days, I

understand the divine less as something somewhere above me and more as something that

lives within and between us in creativity, connection, love, community, and the strange electricity

that happens when human beings truly see one another.

And maybe that is what I was being prepared for.

But getting from that funeral home to that room was one hell of a journey.

My mother died a few months before her 36th birthday. For much of my life, I couldn't imagine

myself getting much older than she had. Somewhere inside me was a finish line I hadn't

consciously chosen. I was terrified that I would become her, while simultaneously recreating so

many of the patterns I was desperately trying to escape.

After my mother died, I was raised by my dad, who didn't know what to do with me or with his

own grief. By the time I was a teenager, our relationship had deteriorated, and eventually he

abandoned me. I was still in high school.

I was unhoused. I didn't have consistent access to medical or mental health care. I struggled

with addiction. I was angry and lonely and desperately looking for love and attention anywhere I

could find it.

And I was also a cheerleader, artist, an athlete. Funny. Creative. Lovable. I was also smart as

hell. Even in the middle of all that chaos, I stayed on the honor roll. My senior year, I earned

straight A's while missing more than fifty days of school and still graduated at the top of my

class.

I share that because when we talk about young people who are struggling, we have a tendency

to turn them into a list of problems. Homeless. Addicted. Truant. Angry. At risk.

But those words would never have been enough to describe me. There was always another

person underneath them. Fortunately, some of the adults around me could see her.

When I was fifteen, I was released from juvenile detention and needed to complete community

service hours. A friend told me there was a woman at school who could help. She had been

seeing this woman since middle school and told me she was “really cool.” More importantly, she

told me this was an adult we could actually talk to.

I thought she was out of her mind. I didn't have a great track record with trusting adults. But

eventually I walked into the office of a case manager through Communities In Schools, told her

my story, and pretty much never left.

She helped me access health care and mental health services, and connected me with

community resources. She communicated with my teachers when my life outside school made

being a student nearly impossible, and helped me understand systems I didn't know how to

navigate. She encouraged me to apply for scholarships and helped me begin imagining college

as something that could actually belong to me.

And I fought her. Of course I did. I had learned that people leave.

My mother had died. My father had abandoned me. Trusting someone meant giving them the

opportunity to disappear, too. So I tried to make her prove me right.

Once, after I had pushed particularly hard, she told me something I still remember:

“Sometimes I think you push me so far to the edge just to see if I will jump off.”

I told her I thought she was right.

She didn't jump. She stayed. And eventually, my case manager became my mother when she

adopted me after graduating high school.

For years, I told parts of my story as though she had saved my life. In many ways, she did. But

as I have gotten older, I have realized that isn't quite the whole story.

She helped me save my own life, and there is a difference. She couldn't go to therapy for me or

stop using substances for me. She couldn’t complete my schoolwork. She couldn’t heal my grief

or make me believe I was worthy of a future. And she couldn't make the decisions that would

eventually build that future.

What she could do was make those decisions possible.

She could sit beside me while I figured out the paperwork. She could tell me which office to call.

She could communicate with a teacher. She could point toward a resource I didn't know existed.

She could help me understand that “no” sometimes meant appeal. She could remind me of who

I was when I had forgotten.

And eventually, I started choosing myself.

I wish I could say there was one beautiful cinematic moment when that happened. There wasn't.

Healing is considerably less glamorous than that.

Two days after I graduated from high school, my boyfriend died. I won't share the details here,

except to say that I came extraordinarily close to dying, too. Something inside me knew I

couldn't keep living that way. I entered recovery. And slowly, painfully, resentfully, I began

confronting a truth that used to piss me off.

No one was coming to save me.

For a long time, that felt cruel. After everything that had happened to me, I was supposed to fix

it? I hadn't created those wounds. Why should healing them be my responsibility? Eventually, I

began understanding responsibility differently.

I wasn't responsible for what happened to me. But I was the person who would have to decide

what happened next. And, thankfully, I didn't have to make that decision alone.

One of the most important things my case manager taught me was that a resource existing is

not the same thing as a person being able to access it.

Take college.

I had earned a Communities In Schools Student of the Year scholarship to attend my local

community college. I had the grades. I had the ability. Then came financial aid. FAFSA wanted

information from my parents. There was a slight problem. I didn't really have parents.

I had recently taken my father to court trying to recover some of my deceased mother's

belongings. We weren't speaking, and there was no reasonable expectation that he was going

to help me complete financial-aid paperwork.

It would have been very easy for seventeen-year-old me to encounter that bureaucratic wall and

decide college wasn't meant for people like me. Instead, I had learned something:

Don't accept the first no.

There is often an appeal. There may be another form. There might be another person to ask.

My case manager helped me gather paperwork, understand the process, and prepare to

advocate for myself. Eventually, I sat in front of a panel of adults and told them my story so they

could decide whether I could be considered financially independent.

For one of the first times in my life, the painful circumstances I had spent so much energy trying

to survive became part of what allowed me to access something better.

They approved my appeal.

Between financial aid and my scholarship, I enrolled in community college. My case manager

couldn't sit in front of that panel for me, but she helped me get to the chair. That distinction has

shaped almost everything I believe about helping people.

How many young people are surrounded by resources they have absolutely no idea how to

reach? We tell someone to “get help.” Okay. How?

Which number do they call? What happens when nobody answers? What paperwork do they

need? What if they don't have a parent to sign it? What happens if they're denied? Do they

know they can appeal? Do they have transportation? Do they understand the language being

used? Do they trust the person sitting across the desk enough to tell the truth? Sometimes

support isn't pointing toward the door. Sometimes it's walking with someone until they know how

to open it themselves.

College was not magically easy. After everything I'd experienced, I had to relearn how to be a

student. Professors, tutoring centers, and other supports helped me rebuild those habits one

class at a time. And something began happening.

Every class I completed became another tiny piece of evidence. Maybe I can do this. Then

another. Maybe my life can be different. Then another.

Eventually, I became the first person in my family to earn a bachelor's degree.I studied abroad. I

volunteered internationally. I went to Spain through an internship and began teaching English.

Think about that for a moment.The girl who once didn't know where she was going to sleep was

suddenly living in another country. Education made my world bigger.

It gave me experiences I hadn't known existed. It introduced me to people I would never have

met. It gave me language for things I had always felt. It showed me systems and eventually

made me want to change some of them.

I became an educator. And for the next thirteen years, I worked with young people. My students

taught me something my own life had already been trying to teach me. There is almost always a

need underneath the behavior you can see. The angry kid who hasn't turned anything in. The

kid with fifty absences who keeps getting sent out of class. The one who seems like they don't

care. I knew better than to assume I understood their story. After all, I had once been the kid

with more than fifty absences and straight A's.

My job wasn't to rescue my students.It was to meet them where they were without judgment,

show them the tools available to them, and help them develop enough confidence and agency

to use those tools themselves.

I couldn't do the work for them, but I could make sure they knew they didn't have to do it alone.

Because humans were never meant to do this alone.

Over thirteen years, I became a classroom teacher, multilingual student support specialist,

instructional leader, mentor, AVID coordinator, and educational program leader. I helped build

personalized-learning programs designed around the radical idea that education should respond

to the human being sitting in front of us rather than expecting every human being to respond

identically to the system. And somewhere along the way, while I was helping other people grow,

I realized they were helping heal me, too.

That healing wasn't linear. There were years of therapy. Talk therapy. Groups. Cognitive

behavioral therapy. EMDR. Addiction recovery. There were mistakes. There were relationships

that recreated old wounds and times I confused chaos with connection because chaos was

what my nervous system knew.

For years, I lived with what felt like a permanent roller-coaster drop in my stomach.

Hypervigilance had become so familiar that peace could feel suspicious. Therapy helped me

understand that trauma was continuing to inform the way I experienced the present.

I began thinking about trauma almost like a formula.If a series of experiences could teach my

brain and body to respond to the world this way, maybe I could intentionally create new

experiences that taught them something different.

And slowly, I did.

I used to think healing meant endlessly excavating pain.Now I understand that healing can also

be joyful.It can be making art. Laughing until your stomach hurts. Creating something beautiful.

Eating dinner with people who make your shoulders drop. Building community. Doing work that

matters to you.Feeling safe enough to rest.Letting yourself be loved without waiting for the other

shoe to drop.

These days, happiness feels like a warm sunbeam in my chest.My shoulders feel lighter. My

mind isn't living in two places at once.I'm here.

The work I do has changed over the years, but the purpose hasn't.

After thirteen years in public education, I now work in permanent supportive housing with

Plymouth Housing, where I help people who have experienced homelessness navigate

resources, build community connections, and move toward goals that are meaningful to them.

I'm also building Kinship Collaborative, a nonprofit rooted in arts, education, storytelling,

wellness, mutual aid, and gathering.

Our guiding belief is simple. Everyone deserves a place to belong.

I don't think it's an accident that belonging has become the center of my life's work. I spent so

much of my childhood trying to make myself small enough to keep people from leaving while

simultaneously becoming accomplished enough to earn their praise. Now I want to help create

spaces where people don't have to earn belonging or become impressive first. They can simply

arrive.

There is a dangerous way to tell a story like mine. A homeless, drug addicted teenager who just

got our of juvenile detention. Then: scholarship, bachelor's degree, master's degree,

award-winning educator, program leader, nonprofit founder.

Roll credits.

Look! She made it!

But that isn't the lesson I want a young person, or an adult who works with young people, to

take from my life.

Because I did not become worthy of investment when I became successful. I was worthy when I

was eleven years old and eating sugar at my mother's funeral because I didn't know what else

to do with my body. I was worthy at fifteen when I walked into a case manager's office carrying

more pain than I knew how to name.

I was worthy when I was using substances and unhoused. When I was pushing people away, I

was worthy. I was worthy before the degrees, awards, programs, organizations, and job titles. I

deserved housing, healthcare, education, mental health support, safety, and adults who didn’t

give up on me. I deserved those things for the profoundly unremarkable reason that I existed.

So does every young person. They do not have to become someone's inspirational success

story to justify the resources we invest in them.

I am approaching my 40th birthday now. That sentence means more to me than most people

could possibly know. My mother never made it to 36. For much of my life, I couldn't picture

myself as an older woman because I didn't have an internal image of what came next.

Now I do, and what surprises me most isn't what I've accomplished. It's that I am happy to be

here. I trust myself, and I know how to ask for help. I know how to advocate for myself, and

when life hurts, and it will, I can survive discomfort without abandoning myself.

Most importantly, I know that being the hero of my own life doesn’t mean doing everything

alone. It’s quite the opposite.

My life exists because of interdependence. A friend told me about a lady at school who was

“really cool.” A case manager opened her office door. A teacher gave me another chance. A

therapist helped me understand myself. A panel listened to my story. A professor helped me

become a student again.Communities invested resources in me. People loved me until I learned

how to love myself. Someone showed up for me. Eventually, I learned how to show up for

myself. And now, through my work and my opportunity to serve young people with BeKind5, I

get to show up for someone else.

At eleven years old, I thought my tia was telling me that God had some mysterious plan waiting

somewhere in the future. At almost forty, I understand those words differently. I don't think I had

to suffer so I could become who I am or that trauma was assigned to me as some divine lesson.

But I do believe I get to decide what I make from the life I have lived. And I have decided to

make connection, community, joy, and places where other people can discover what was inside

them all along.

Because after all these years, this is the thing I know for sure, change happens one human

interaction at a time.

With Gratitude for reading my story, looking forward to empowering the Youth at Be Kind 5 as a Youth Empowerment Coach,

Kitty