When I was in HS, I got picked on a lot. Also in my country every class has a teacher appointed to them in whom they can confide if there's a need to. So every teacher that holds this extra function has about 40 students under his/her care.

Anyway, when I started HS, I also met the teacher whom was appointed to my class in this function. I remember that I thought he looked quite young (he was in fact 13 years older than me/everyone in my year) and I was quite sceptical about him being in this function. But it turned out it was actually a godsend that we got him as our appointed confident.

I don't know exactly how many times I cried in front of him, but I remember one specific time. It was during lunch break, and I asked if I could have a word with him (in my country it's quite common for students to contact their teachers during breaks to talk about issues/make appointments to do so) we sat down and I was obviously very upset about stuff that was going on and I suppose that I was apologizing for crying, or I was trying really hard not to. Either way, at that moment he told me to just cry it all out. Which was the first time in my life that anyone had told me that.

Whenever there were issues at school, he always went the extra mile for us, and we could always knock on his door to talk about things that were going on. He really did a great job in helping us all.

Years later, about 5 years ago I came across him again by surprise. We had this conversation about how I'd been doing in these past years and I told him about how I was doing. But when I genuinely thanked him and told him that I wouldn't have gotten this far if it weren't for him, and all of his efforts, he started crying since he always felt like he could've done more for me. I hugged him (I was 25 at the time) and told him that he did more than enough to save me at that time. He sobbed for about 2 minutes and when he calmed down a bit he told me that he'd always wondered how I would be doing after all those years.

He was always my favourite teacher, since he also taught one of my favourite subjects. But the main reason was because he was always there for his students.

I'm glad I got the honour to have such a wonderful teacher!