My name is Shyam Patel (click for pronunciation) and I am originally from Montreal, Canada. I am currently a PhD Student at York University, where my research examines and interrogates racial conflict, harm, and tension through transformative justice. I completed my MA at the University of Ottawa. My thesis is titled, "Walking Into a Sea of Whiteness," for which I received the Canadian Association for Teacher Education (CATE) Recognition Award. I am also an Ontario Certified Teacher (OCT), having done my Teacher Education at the University of Ottawa from 2018-2020. I also worked as a teaching fellow with Teach for India, teaching Grades 1-4 and obtained a Bachelor's of Commerce from McGill University prior to then. Above all else, I am a teacher and I consider it a calling. Through my intergenerational stories, lived experiences, and teaching life, I am like Aparna Mishra Tarc in that I believe grief precedes all emotion and I am committed to contemplating what it means to work through grief and trauma in the classrom. As a result, I am drawn to Thich Nhat's Hanh suggestion that the teacher is a healer, and I have a longing for what the provocation—one of addressing and confronting both new and old traumas—might offer. In other words, I take seriously the words Pat Palulis asks me to consider: to work within the wound. Though it remains a complex and sometimes ineffable responsibility, I am committed to curricular attunements and pedagogical responses that hold space for all our emotions, and, most of all, I am dedicated to fashioning hope out of despair, to borrow the words of Khalida Jarrar.