Untold Stories of DDS: Issue 22

ISSUE N.22

JAN 2026

DAVIDSON DAY UPPER SCHOOL NEWS MAGAZINE

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UNTOLD STORIES OF DDS FEATURING SPEECHES BY ASHLEY ADKINS BELLA LEE TERESA CROWE JENNIFER SHILEY

THE BELONGING COUNCIL PRESENTS:

"STUDENT VOICES” OF FALL 2025

THE POWER OF BEING KIND SPEECH DELIVERED ON OCTOBER 17, 2025

BY ASHLEY ADKINS, CLASS OF 2027

“T

o be or not to be” is a question asked by the title character in William Shakespeare’s tragic play, Hamlet. Hamlet is pondering whether it is better to face life’s problems or to escape them by dying. Every day, people are faced with a choice. Choices that they need to make that dictate how their lives will go. Many harmful events lead up to Hamlet feeling this sense of despair, indicating how our actions can hurt others, leading them to feel despair, or, at the very least, self-doubt.

On our first day of Patriot Pals this year, we were tasked to talk about Davidson Day’s new CORE values. Along with our younger Patriot Pal, we had to pick our favorite, or what we felt to be the most important, core value. My pal was hard to discuss this topic with because she is in Pre-K and ended up just picking one at random. I picked Empathy.

Photo credit: Ashley Adkins

To me, empathy means understanding or realizing that the living, breathing people around us are humans too. They have lives, feelings, and people they care about.

Sometimes when I’m walking in the hallway, and I hear people talk about our teachers or their peers like they aren’t human, it upsets me. It doesn’t hurt to be kind, so we shouldn’t tolerate the micro-aggressions or “jokes” that really aren’t all that funny. I myself have experienced the power of being kind, and I want to share a story about it with you right now.

When I was in middle school, Mrs. Gouge – my advisor at the time – was going through a really hard patch in her life because her mother was sick. She had sat our advisory down and told us about what was going on – but in doing so, she was also apologizing for being sad at work. After she spoke, I walked up to her and gave her a hug. This hug started a trend where every time I would see her, I would give her a hug and ask her how she was doing. She came up to me one day and told me how much she appreciated the fact that I was seeing her not only as a teacher, but as a human being. She told me that my small act of kindness made her terrible situation regarding her mom just a little bit easier to handle; hearing her say that sent me over the moon with happiness, but it also made me pause and think.

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I thought about how even though it only took a few seconds out of my day to ask her about her mom or give her a hug, it deeply impacted her, to the point where she felt the need to thank me directly.

Make the choice to be kind. Don’t settle for making a degrading joke or saying harmful words. Set a new standard for how we treat people at this school, and make an effort to see how teachers, like us students, are humans too.

SPEECH DELIVERED ON DECEMBER 8, 2025

BY BELLA LEE, CLASS OF 2027

I

f there’s one thing high school teaches us, it’s how to act like we are all fine when, in reality, most of us aren’t. Singer Leonard Cohen once said, “We are all broken, that's how the light gets in.” And I think that applies to us more than we realize.

To me, this means that the hardest, most unexpected moments often teach us more than anything else. Being “broken” doesn’t mean you’re weak. It means you’ve lived, you’ve felt, you’ve learned. It’s through those cracks—the mistakes, the heartbreak, the moments you wish you could erase—that we learn the most and grow into the people we are meant to become. Our struggles don’t dim our light; they let it shine in ways perfection never could.

Photo credit: Bella Lee

In high school, it’s easy to compare ourselves to our peers—through grades, looks, or athletics—and think we’re the only ones struggling to be our best. But everyone carries pains they don’t talk about. Some of the conversations I have gained the most from are the ones that are filled with vulnerability and openness about these pains. It is in those moments of honesty where the cracks are revealed, that we see the light in each other —the humanity that connects us all. I'm fortunate to have these conversations regularly with one of my best friends at this school. Through them, we’ve grown very close. Not only do I gain insight from his perspective on life and challenges, but I’m also able to reflect on my own mistakes and continue to grow as a person. It is through this deep self reflection that I am able to find light in my traits that I once saw as setbacks or flaws.

Throughout my 8th to 10th grade years, I found myself struggling more than I ever had. From ever since I can remember, I always had trouble with being comfortable in my own skin; I always felt a little less important, less smart, and overall less wanted than those around me. During this time, I was constantly searching for validation anywhere I could find it, hoping someone else would convince me I was enough when I couldn’t convince myself. Not to mention, I was struggling within my family, my friendships were unstable, and my overall mental health had declined. I was consumed with all the pain that was seemingly being thrown at me with no explanation, along with academic pressures and a lack of self-pride. It felt like every part of my life had a crack in it, and I didn’t know how to hold the shattered pieces together.

During the middle of my sophomore year, I reached a breaking point. The pain I had been carrying for so long finally caught up to me, and it started pushing me toward choices that only dug me deeper into the hole I was already in. The people close to me saw the state I had reached and, even when I resisted, they pushed me to climb out of that hole, forcing me to confront the struggles I had been avoiding. For a while I avoided healing, and isolated myself from my family and friends. I felt as if nothing would ever change, and I would feel this way forever.

When everything around me felt dark, the small moments of light stood out even more against the shadows. The moments I might have

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overlooked in the past became the ones that kept me going. A teacher who believed in me, a smile in the hallway, or a short but meaningful conversation became the fuel that pushed me forward. Those bright lights around me filled the cracks inside, reminding me that even in the hardest times, hope and connection can shine through. Slowly, I began seeing my life differently. My mindset that once let every bad moment overshadow the good started to shift, and I realized that the small moments of light and joy could outshine the darkness.

I began breaking down the wall of hardships that had once blocked my path, and I realized that everything I wished had never happened actually taught me more than if those experiences had never occurred. They made me stronger, more mature, and more insightful. Most of all, I came to accept that everything I had gone through had brought me to this point and shaped me into the person I am today— someone who understands that the cracks we carry are not weaknesses, but openings for light to shine in.

I carry this lesson with me through every struggle; whether I’m studying for an AP chemistry test or prepping for my SATs, resolving conflicts with others, or pushing myself when I feel unmotivated, I know that every obstacle I overcome — no matter how big or small — will teach me something valuable. We can’t hide our cracks, and we shouldn’t try. They are the very places where light — hope, courage, love, and resilience — enters our lives. Every struggle, every moment of doubt, every setback carries a lesson if we let it. I’ve learned that the challenges I once thought would break me ended up teaching me more than I could have imagined. This new view on life has made me stronger at the face of challenge, and rather than giving in to the darkness around me, I search for light wherever I can find it.

If I can turn my cracks into light, so can each of you. Don’t be afraid to face your challenges, to feel deeply, or to let yourself be vulnerable — because that’s where your strength is, and that’s where your light shines brightest.

You can never undo the cracks, but you can let light shine through them — light that could’ve never passed through if the cracks were never made.

RISING FROM THE DEPTHS OF CHRONIC ILLNESS SPEECH DELIVERED ON DECEMBER 8, 2025

BY TERESA CROWE, UPPER SCHOOL TEACHER

“I

fiercely believe that the collective healing of our nervous systems is the next step in the evolution of humanity.” -Teresa Crowe

Photo credit: Laura Woods

When Mr. McGill asked me if I would be willing to share with you all, my first thought was, “Well, what would I say?” But at the same time those words were coming out of my mouth, I knew exactly what it was that I wanted to share with you.

If you know my story, you might know it goes something like, I left an engineering job to become a teacher in 2005. I taught high school physics and chemistry in the Washington DC area for 7 years before my children were born. We moved to North Carolina

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while I was pregnant with my oldest daughter, Virginia, and my husband had a very demanding job, so despite the fact that I spent years before my theoretical children existed agonizing over whether I’d keep teaching or not once they came along, the decision to be the primary caregiver for my children turned out to be the right decision for our family. I was home with my children for 9 years before returning to teaching when my youngest, Anna, entered first grade.

What you probably don’t know, however, is that I spent 7 of those 9 years that I was not teaching so debilitated by chronic illness that I could not have worked if I wanted to. It’s not exactly the type of thing you bring up in a job interview.

Now that I have been a part of this community for two and a half years, I feel safe here. I feel valued here. I feel grateful to be a part of a community in which I do not have to keep any parts of who I am hidden. My experience being sick and my journey of getting better has informed so much about how I view the world, how I interact with people, and how I live my life – it is so much a part of who I am now, how could I not share it with you?

The most persistent symptom of my chronic illness was stomach pain. While I had some in 2012, it became relentless in 2014.

Debilitating, burning pain that was always worst at night. Like most chronic illness, there were other problems too. Among them, I had a bone tumor in my jawbone, my mandible, called a central giant cell granuloma on which I had four surgeries – 2015, 2018, and two in 2020. Three of those four surgeries were performed by the chair of oral surgery at the UNC Chapel Hill Hospital, where I was referred because my case was so aggressive and so extensive.

Doctors. SO MANY doctors. I saw so many doctors.

General practitioner. Dentist. Jaw surgeon. Endocrinologist. Gastroenterologist #1. I had an endoscopy, an ultrasound, a HIDA scan. I took medicine.

But the pain persisted. Pain is so exhausting. And it only got worse, not better. I rested. I meditated. I took more medicine. I saw more doctors – gastroenterologist #2, functional medicine doctor. I tried acupuncture. Years passed. I questioned whether I could ever get better. We moved to Cornelius in January of 2019. I tried new doctors, and trying to fill them in was exhausting. I got a referral to a third gastroenterologist and tried another functional medicine doctor.

I could not believe what my life had become. I was energetic, I exercised, I ate well, I loved life, and did not hesitate to take it on.

Neither the doctors nor I could figure out what was wrong or how to make it better. I crawled through my days, surviving on minimal sleep and doing my best to get my children to school while exhausted and in pain.

It all bottomed out – if you’ve had my class, you know I love a good graph! In the summer of 2020, when everyone else was frustrated we couldn’t go anywhere because of COVID, I was relieved because I was so sick I could not function. My immune system was full on freaking out and reacting to everything, most noticeably food. I did not know what I could eat. My doctor was highly alarmed by the level of an inflammation marker I can no longer remember the name of. And that summer ended with jaw surgeries numbers 3 and 4.

The upturn finally came with the help of yet another digestive health specialist and an alternative medicine called Nambudripad’s Allergy Elimination Technique, which did wonders to settle my immune system. But it was not a case of instant gratification at all.

The road to healing was long and it is still ongoing. Understanding my chronic nerve pain proved to be one of the most elusive and longest lasting issues, but I was finally on a road that led me step after step to what I needed to know to continue healing.

Books. SO MANY BOOKS. I read SO MANY BOOKS. And what ensued can only be described as a comprehensive body-mind-spirit healing journey.

The chronic pain world is one that many people know nothing about and somewhere that people who find it end up only when nothing else works. Alan Gordon, author of The Way Out, taught me that neuroplastic pain lights up a different area of the brain when

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scanned than acute pain. Drs. John Sarno, Gabor Mate, and Harold Schubiner taught me that I have the exact personality type that most often faces chronic illness and chronic pain. Nicole Sachs, host of The Cure for Chronic Pain podcast, taught me how to release trapped energy from my nervous system. Dr. Peter Levine, developer of Somatic Experiencing and author of numerous books on healing, along with sisters and authors Amelia and Emily Nagoski, helped me to understand the science behind what on earth was happening in my nervous system.

In the summer of 2021, exactly a year after my health bottomed out, my kids’ previous school called me and said, “We heard you used to teach science…” I had no idea if I was physically capable of the demands of teaching, but I trusted and continued on the journey. I’ve been back in the classroom for five years now.

Getting better is the hardest thing I have ever done in my entire life. At times, the road has been lonely and dark. But it is also the deepest, most real, and most true thing I have ever done. Up until this point, I have not talked a lot about my journey, save for a few trusted companions along the way, but I fiercely believe that the collective healing of our nervous systems is the next step in the evolution of humanity, and it cannot be done by AI. Sometimes I look at my feed and every other post is about embodied living or nervous system regulation, and I think that everyone knows this already. But when I look around the real world, I realize that so many more people need to know. And so I have hope that someone could be helped, someone could endure less pain, someone’s road might be just a bit easier because I share my story.

SPEECH DELIVERED ON OCTOBER 17, 2025

BY JENNIFER SHILEY, UPPER SCHOOL TEACHER

“H

ow many of you are rich?

I had a great conversation last weekend with a couple friends about rich and poor, so it’s been on my mind.

I’m also working on an essay right now called “People Currency.” That title doesn’t sound great now that I hear it out loud, but here’s where it comes from.

My decisions and behavior say a lot about what I value. Have you ever heard people say, “You can tell what a person cares about by looking at their budget, how they spend their money?” As it turns out I value paying bills and ordering takeout for dinners.

The two friends I was talking with last Saturday were Abong and Jessie, two women Ms. McAlister and I traveled with to Kenya over the summer.

If you were here last Spring, you may remember the Upper School students in the Community Engagement Council ran a huge backpack collection in partnership with No BackPack Day, and Ms. McAlister and I took the 700+ school bags from Davidson to Kenya to distribute them to kids in 9 different schools.

Photo credit: No BackPack Day

Abong and Jessie were on the trip, but we hadn’t really had a chance to

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catch up since we got back in July, except for a few texts. Over breakfast at my house together on Saturday, Jessie asked me to describe my African experience. *** I wish I took more pictures. It was a quick trip, but we did so much and I saw so many things that are really hard to explain because there’s no matching concept here. Roofs and walls on houses hardly connect. Schools don’t have doors or windows. Kids’ school uniforms are torn, missing buttons, and some held together with safety pins. Many kids aren’t wearing matching shoes.

Markets sell baskets, goats, medicine, worn clothes and sneakers, all piled on the dirt ground to sort through.

I saw a man refill a plastic water bottle from a muddy puddle and drink it. I looked at Liz who said to me, “Shiley, he’s either already sick or immune by now.” Either way it made me feel sick to see him drink muddy water because most people there don’t have running water.

The temptation was to look around and see poverty. We collected backpacks because kids walk miles to school on dirt roads carrying whatever they need for the day. Clearly, they don’t have things.

I shared that much when Abong said something that made me pause.

She and Jessie are native Cameroonians who met through their African country’s small social groups that meet at a different friends’ house every month in Raleigh and Charlotte, where they each live. Their networks exist to help carry on the traditions of their homeland so that people have people who see each other, care for each other, remind them of where they came from, and teach their youth about their traditions and values.

Abong said, “Shiley, the people are our riches.” And I immediately connected what she said to something personal that made the point for me.

I was my sister’s beneficiary on her important documents and policies, so when she passed away I inherited, not just her son, who graduated from here a couple years ago and is easily one of my favorite people of all time, but also a ridiculous amount of money from her life insurance company. I opened the envelope with the check inside a couple weeks after she died. I looked at the amount. It was more money than I had ever seen, and I truly could have cared less. I wanted to give it back because the exchange didn’t make sense.

I missed my people; I valued her life way more than this money.

Jessie had tears in her eyes when I told her that story. She reiterated what we heard often in Kenya in the three days we were there, that Kenyans are rich because they already have everything they need.

Ironically, a few days later, driving in the car on the way home from school with Jordan, he was telling me about the classes he loves and the ones he doesn’t.

He has 5th grade Science with Ms. Gouge and he loves her class. He told me all about how he’s learning that the environment provides us with everything we need to survive. He pointed out the window and said, “We don’t need a Chase Bank. We’re already rich if we would just recognize what we have.”

I think that’s what I’m trying to say here now. ***

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I asked you if you’re rich, and I’d bet the instinct was to think about what’s in our bank accounts. Whatever our accumulation of things may be, money or assets, it’s still possible to have things and be poor.

It was the beauty of my African experience to see the richness of Kenyan kids having fun, dancing, and showing off during a school visit. To see a matriarch on her homestead teach us how she cultivates her kitchen garden and cooks meals with a stove made from materials from the earth. To be welcomed as friends on a whole other continent because we share a drive to make access to education easier for kids everywhere.

And it’s the richness of coming back home and getting the biggest hugs ever from my family; coming to school here knowing I’m a teammate, a friend, and a teacher.

As hard as some days can be, I really do wake up feeling like I’ve got everything. People are my riches. And if that’s true, how I spend my time and energy with the people in my life says a lot about how much I value who they are to me. *** I think you’re richer than you realize.

Look at the person next to you and tell them, “I’m rich because of you.” Look at your second choice person on the other side and tell them, “You make me rich.” *** If no one else tells you today, I love you and I believe in you.

Take care of each other.

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