I was on LinkedIn the other night, scrolling through names I hadn’t seen in years, and it hit me like a wave. Not a dramatic wave, not the kind that knocks you over, but the slow kind that rises around your ankles and suddenly you realize you’re standing in something deep. I was looking at former students. People I spent semesters with, people whose portfolios I critiqued at midnight, people who sat in my classroom at Keiser and trusted me with something fragile, which is their belief that they could actually do this thing, this design thing, this creative life thing. And I realized I’d lost most of them.
Not to drama. Not to some falling out. To logistics.
You know, I had a Facebook account for years. ABCDGreg. And I’m not exaggerating when I tell you I had close to 4,000 friends on there. Former students going back over two decades, colleagues, photography club members, people from every chapter of a life that has had a lot of chapters. Pages I’d built, groups I was part of, conversations stretching back years. And then one day a hacker decided my account was worth breaking into, looking for credit card information. I caught it fast enough to stop the financial damage, but the account was gone. The 4,000 plus friends, all my former students, the pages, the groups, all of it, gone. Just like that. Twenty-something years of digital community, erased because somebody wanted to see if I had a Visa on file.
I started over. ABCDGreg1. A couple hundred friends now instead of thousands. And here’s the thing I didn’t expect: I haven’t reconnected with people I honestly care about. People I think about. People I invested real emotional energy into, and I know they invested it into me too, because that’s how teaching works. It’s not a one-way street. You give everything you’ve got to a room full of people three nights a week, and they give it right back, and after enough semesters that bond is not casual. It’s not professional. It’s something closer to family, the kind of family you choose on purpose.
So this is me, saying it plainly: find me. I’m trying to find you.
I know that sounds simple, but let me tell you why it isn’t. I’ve been teaching for over 25 years. I started when I was 39, after my whole previous life collapsed, the international business, the divorce, all of it. AJ Chase asked me to teach Introduction to Computers at Keiser, and something clicked that I didn’t know was waiting to click. I found the thing I was supposed to be doing. And for 25 years I’ve poured everything into it. Not just the curriculum, not just the lectures. The 2 AM emails when somebody was ready to quit. The recommendation letters. The portfolio reviews. The conversations after class that went an hour longer than they should have because a student needed to talk and I wasn’t going to be the one who said I had somewhere else to be.
I carry every one of you. That’s not a metaphor. I carry your faces, your stories, the moments when something finally clicked and you looked different walking out than you did walking in. I remember who struggled and pushed through. I remember who almost quit and didn’t. I remember who did quit and came back. Every single one of those stories lives in me, and I’m 64 years old now, turning 65 at the end of May, and the feeling that dominates my life more than any other feeling is gratitude. I think I could write a hundred pages just thanking all the people who brought me to this moment, and it would be an incomplete list.
But here’s what I need to be honest about, too. I pulled back from social media for reasons that weren’t all noble. I used Facebook sometimes to throw temper tantrums, to play the echo chamber, to get rowdy with opinions. And it felt good in the moment, you know, the way the worst of you gets echoed back with “you’re not alone, we all feel that way, here’s more fuel for the fire.” The algorithms are set up to do exactly that. And I watched it poison something. Not my relationships with all of you, but my ability to see you clearly. Because when a student I loved posted something I couldn’t stand, I had a choice: keep looking and let it change how I felt about them, or stop looking and keep loving them from a distance. I chose distance. And I don’t regret it, because I value them too much to let what they may be posting or saying publicly poison how I feel about them personally. They’re entitled to their own opinions, even if they’re different from mine. But the cost of that choice was silence. And silence, over enough years, starts to feel like absence.
So I’ve been absent. And I’m sorry for that.
Here’s where I am now. I’m not chasing arguments anymore. I’m not fueling fires. I’m about learning and helping and growing, and wherever I can, making connections. I’ve spent the last few years deep in research, in creativity, in figuring out how to help students learn in ways that actually stick, and it’s the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done. I’m building things I can’t talk about yet, but I promise you they exist because of you. Because of every question you asked that I couldn’t answer well enough. Because of every time I watched someone struggle with a concept and thought, there has to be a better way to teach this.
And I’m on LinkedIn now, not for the professional networking thing, not because I’m looking for a job or building a brand. I’m there because I want to find you. I want to see what you’re doing. I want to know that your life turned out okay, that the thing we worked on together in that classroom mattered, that you’re still creating, still pushing, still being the person I saw in you before you saw it in yourself.
So here’s my offer, and it’s a real one. If you need a recommendation letter, I’ll write it. If you want me to share your portfolio, your blog, your work, I’ll tell the world everything I know about you. With your permission, obviously. If you want to build an alumni network, something real, not a LinkedIn group that nobody checks, I’m open for that. If you just want to say hi and tell me you’re alive and okay, that’s enough. That’s more than enough.
I love you guys. I miss you guys. I want to hear from you guys.
Find me. I’m trying to find you.
And if you’re one of the ones who posts things I wouldn’t agree with, I want you to know something. I still love you. I chose to stop looking at the posts so I could keep loving the person. That’s not weakness. That’s not avoidance. That’s me deciding that 25 years of watching you grow matters more than any opinion you hold today. You’re still mine. You’re still one of the people I carried out of that classroom in my heart, and nothing you post on any platform is going to change that.
So don’t be a stranger. Put me in as a connection. Drop me a message. Let me know how I can support you, how I can let you know how much you really mean to me. Because you do. You always have.
I’m at kugraphics.org. I’m on LinkedIn. I’m right here.
Come find me.
