Jasmine Deabler

Walk into Good Things Thrift and Craft, and you might see Jasmine Deabler behind the counter. If you’re in doubt, she’s the young woman with the flair for fashion, a soft voice and bountiful patience. What you might not realize is that she’s only 17. She graduated this June with high honors. She plays seven instruments. And come September, she’ll be at the University of Maine at Augusta, studying for her degree in mental health and human services.

I grew up on a little homestead in Waldoboro, the kind with vegetables, flowers and animals.  My chores were tending the animals and gardens and watering the flowers.  The animals were my favorite.  I had – I still have — a chicken named Petunia who is super-sweet, super-sassy, super-bratty, and who has always been a little bit different from the rest of the chickens.  I think that’s why I resonate with her.

I had a bit of social issues in school.  I wasn’t interested in sports.  I was into music and art and writing.  Poetry especially, that’s always been my jam.  Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson.

I cared about getting an education and getting good grades.  I was the weird one, the odd one out.  And I was bullied a lot, called names, put down for my looks or how I dressed or my weight.  There was this one girl in fifth grade who always piled on me, and I’d come home in tears saying, “Mom, I can’t do this.  I can’t go to school anymore.  This girl has made it terrible for me.”

My mom called my-fifth grade teacher, Miss Decker.  She described what was happening, and said, “But I can’t do anything as a parent.  I’m at my wits end.”

The next day, Miss Decker pulled the girl aside, and later the girl wrote me an apology letter.  And to me, Miss Decker said, “If I make you feel unsafe or that you can’t talk to me about bullying, I apologize.  My students should have a safe place in my classroom.  Being bullied is awful.  All my students should feel safe here.”

I have never forgotten her.  Miss Decker was unusual.

I started home-schooling in eighth grade, and it was wonderful.  It gave me the freedom to be in my own introverted world, to do extra work in the subjects that interested me, and to make my own friends in my own time.  It also gave me the flexibility to work at Good Things which I’ve done since fourteen.

This past year, I did something different.  I enrolled in Maine Connections, a public online high school.  It was my senior year, and  I wanted to try a school with the structure of teachers, deadlines, and classes while learning at home.

It turned out to be a hard year.  That previous summer, I’d just discovered I was bi-polar.  But I really think that I got suddenly overwhelmed at the idea of graduating.  Instead of facing it, my brain went, “Okay, then I just won’t work.”  So, I began avoiding schoolwork.  I procrastinated.  The more behind in my studies, the more I avoided them.  It snowballed until I was 120 assignments behind.  My 12^th grade advisory teacher, Jessica Rice, called me out.  She wasn’t going to let me quietly disappear.

She never told me I needed to “catch up” because she knew that my being that far behind was embarrassing enough on its own.  She understood me.

She told me she wanted me to graduate.  And then, she acted like it.  She asked what was going on when my camera suddenly stayed off. She noticed when I looked exhausted. She asked how things were at home. She asked how I was doing mentally. She never made me feel ashamed or bad because of where I was at.  Instead, she asked me what I thought would help for me to actually sit down and do the work.

She remade schedules. She wrote out assignment goals. She took my job into account because she understood school wasn’t the only thing happening in my life.

We eventually came up with Mondays as my “schoolwork” day.  She cleared time in her schedule, got on Zoom with me.  And I used that time specifically to catch up. Most of the time my camera was off.  We really didn’t need to talk. She wasn’t tutoring me or hovering, and she wasn’t asking if I’d finished.  She was just there.

And that worked. I couldn’t wander off and do something else, even with the camera off.  She understood that the most useful thing she could do was literally just sitting on the other end of a Zoom call while I worked.

She is the reason I graduated.  And when I did, after she’d spent that whole year helping me dig myself out, she didn’t act like it was some unbelievable miracle.  She just said, “Congratulations. I knew you would.”  That was probably one of the most meaningful things she could have said.  I graduated with high honors, and I got to walk the stage and get my diploma.

I used to want to be a teacher.  But I think, as I’ve grown older, I’ve seen how badly teachers are treated.  Yet they’re the ones taking care of our kids, educating them, and shaping them into adults.  And for that, they’re paid terribly.

Worse, teachers are degraded.  On Facebook students write awful things, bullying them as if they were one of their peers, and it’s mean and vindictive.  Parents criticize how they teach and demean them, put them down.

I’ve always wanted to help people, and I have a soft spot for those who have been through a lot as a child.  I think, instead of teaching, I can do more as a pediatric therapist – like get to the things underneath that are stopping a child or adolescent, or why they are suddenly quitting doing their homework or why they are exhausted all the time, or why they are suddenly acting out or starting to bully other kids, or what is happening at home that they’re carrying silently around, the things nobody else can see.

There is a lot of judgement out there.  One day I was working in the shop when a woman came in.  She was thin, sunburned and covered in sweat and said, “I hate to bother you, but can I ask you for a couple of dollars because I broke down at the Big Apple, and I had to walk all the way here because no one will give me money for gas.”

I tried to offer her twenty, but she wouldn’t take it.  So, I gave her a ten-dollar bill and then I gave her water because, in my head, when you see someone struggling, it’s the right thing to do.

The woman behind her waited until she left, and said, “You just gave money to a drug addict.”

I said, “You don’t know that.  She came in asking for help.  She said she’d run out of gas. She was very clearly hot, she’d clearly been in the heat for a while, and she told me she needed help.  No other context matters.  We don’t know the full story.  I would rather give money to someone who might be here for other stuff than not help them in need.  Besides, we’re a non-profit, and that is what we do — we help people.  If I can give a little money out of my cash register to help someone, I am happy to do that.”

It makes me sad how we tend to ostracize people based on their looks and their vibes.  Everyone around seems to be lit.

I myself have grown a lot of sympathy towards anyone in any situation.  I have friends with family members who were drug addicts, alcoholics.  I have family members who were alcoholics.  People in my life have died from a drug overdose or alcohol poisoning.

They’re still somebody’s mom, father, daughter.  What they do should not define them in a single way. They are still human.