About Me — Christian Alberto Ledesma
A kid who struggled with words grows up to use them as a high school administrator and dreamer
I still want to be an astronaut. It was my dream at age five. A dream that continued in my adolescence as I fell in love with Star Trek and all things science fiction. A dream that I renewed every few years as I planned for ways to join the astronaut corps. A dream that retreated into the corners of my public school educator brain and came flooding back with the privatization of space travel.
Right now, I live the dream of serving over 1000 universes as a high school principal in Minneapolis. I get to ensure that 1000 students have the opportunity to dream their dream. I work to create and revise and re-vision the structures and conditions that allow our staff to do their work, despite the increasingly difficult conditions. It’s a dream.
The Trouble with Words
When I was in kindergarten, just learning the English language, I was so quiet my friend thought I was non-verbal. In the second grade, my teacher made me the MC of the school show. I shook the entire time. My essay to the New York University financial aid office applying for scholarship funds was so riddled with grammatical errors that I’m convinced the person granting aid thought, this kid needs serious work, and threw me a lifeline.
The kid who struggled in two languages and grew to own the power of words in both now gets to use those words to plan, inspire, communicate with families and donors, and occasionally, write for fun. I still struggle with words. I blink emptily at idioms I’ve never heard. I wrestle to find words in English that come to my brain in Spanish. I hit black holes where my words, once flowing, disappear.
I’ve learned, however, to not only own the power of words but also own the struggle. I’ve learned to learn from the empty pockets, to learn from missing words to grow vocabulary, and to learn to mix and match idioms for a good laugh. The trouble with words is that they can be fun.
The Fun
Looking back at pictures of my childhood, you’ll find a large, toothy smile with a dimple and a half punctuating each end. Though we struggled with economic poverty, my Ecuadorian immigrant family’s home was full of joy, laughter, loud conversation, love, and damn good food. The smile was genuine. The smile meant I was having fun.
I was blessed with a grandmother and aunts who found the fun and comedy in even the hardest of moments. My grandmother Maria, it was told, could have a funeral home rolling in laughter; her own way of honoring the deceased. From her, I inherited the ability to find laughter in the dark. The smile I carried was often from the funny moments I was reliving in my head or the jokes I could not speak out loud.
Growing into adolescence I found my smile through friends, creative play, meeting new people and learning from their life experiences, and from enjoying small moments. My grandfather Bolivar was a man who cherished every morsel of food, every sip of good drink, and enjoyed long walks that ended with him getting lost. From him, I inherited the ability to enjoy just being. I smile just savoring a cheat meal. I smile watching teenagers teenage and find their way.
Finding My Path
As a teenager, the paths before me were many but my view was limited. I went from being an efficient slacker in high school to double majoring in American Politics and Spanish American Literature while being pre-med, to being pre-Law, to creating my own Honors program via the Spanish Department to study bilingual education so I could become a teacher. My goal at the end of all the weaving was to serve students like me. I wanted to go back and help other learners of English find their voice. I wanted to help other kids struggling with economic poverty to understand the riches and gifts they bring to the world and use them to lift themselves up.
Along the way, I met a beautiful, incredibly intelligent, talented woman, who was just crazy enough to make life exciting. She said yes by the foot of the Rocky Mountains and together we grew a family that now includes three gorgeous, brilliant children and a lovable mutt. We moved from New York City to Minneapolis to be closer to her Midwestern roots and found ourselves loving this land of the Dakota people that blends city and nature better than almost anywhere.
As my work opened up new roads in education leadership I found myself becoming an administrator of a high school that served new immigrants and refugees and later principal of the most diverse high school in the city. The New Yorker in me smiles as I watch 25 different nations speaking 17 different languages enter our building every day. New York City is a magical place with magical people and magical words. So is the high school where I serve.
Magical Words
Listening to the magical, scary stories my grandmother told, I never doubted the authenticity. Ecuador is a special place with stories that are both of this world and the next at the same time. What I grew up believing to be true, my gringo friends would blow off as a tall tale. They didn’t believe the magic. What do you mean my grandfather didn’t fight off a tiger? Yes, my grandmother did indeed meet the Devil himself. I learned, eventually, that this problem was theirs, not mine.
I put magical words on paper. For the longest time I didn’t consider myself a writer, even though I’d been writing Letters to the Editor since Middle School, wrote for the high school newspaper, wrote for online publications that paid me in soccer tickets, wrote a blog dedicated to my firstborn, and wrote a weekly newsletter to my staff. My brain could not accept that the kid who struggled with words was a writer. And then, the universe aligned, and one of the many somewhat random collections of words I had put to paper was published as part of a multimedia project that highlighted food. And they paid me. Real paper money. The brain finally knighted me, Writer.
It turns out that a lot of my personal writing includes food and memories of food, and sometimes just stories of my family or stories they told, or brain connections that make no sense to anyone but me and my writer friends. I write for them, the writer friends who continue to type away in coffee shops or scribble in notebooks in bars and dream. And I write for me. I write for my grandmother and grandfather, the best storytellers. I write for my kids and their kids and their kids.
I still want to be an astronaut though.
Follow me on Twitter: @MrCLedesma
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