06/08/2026
A School Shooting Ended My Teaching Career.
Mental Health Gave Me a New One.
I'm Erin Harris. This is my story - and the story of how Un/Do Mindset began.
I taught for 15 years - K through 8. Nine different schools across the DC and Denver metro areas. I loved every single second of it.
And then a student brought a gun to school. A student from a rival school gang, and while the kids were sitting outside eating lunch, it became a drive-by.
No fatalities, but I want to be honest with you about something: "no fatalities" doesn't mean "no damage." I checked myself into a mental health facility. Twice.
And those two experiences changed my entire life.
Inside those facilities, I learned something that I genuinely believe every single human being on this planet deserves to know: how your brain actually processes trauma, and what happens when it doesn't.
I often come back to this metaphor: imagine your brain is a filing cabinet.
When trauma happens and you have the right tools, you can file that experience away properly. Label it, close the drawer, move forward.
But when trauma happens without those tools? That paper gets shoved in crumpled. The edges get bent. It sits there, unprocessed, pulling at everything else in the cabinet.
I spent years as an adult trying to pull out old, crumpled papers, smooth the edges, tape the rips, and finally file them correctly. It works, but it's exhausting. And it's late.
What if we could give kids those filing skills before trauma hits?
The privilege I didn't know I had
Here's what it took for me to access those life-changing resources: I had to be an adult in crisis. I had to have insurance. And I had to have $1,600 in cash.
That's not the reality for most people on this planet. Not even close.
And when I came home from those facilities and started telling my story, I heard something I didn't expect.
ER doctors. EMTs. Firefighters.
