Where you stumble and fall, there you find pure gold.
— Carl Jung
After 22 years as a classroom teacher, I took a job as an independent school administrator. Fueled by a love for new challenges, an innate compulsion to test myself, and a genuine desire to share my gifts on a broader scale, I signed on as the first director of academics at John Burroughs School (Missouri), a position drafted into existence just a few months before I arrived. I lasted 24 months. This is the story of that journey — its challenges, struggles, and joys. I offer it not as a cautionary tale, but as a living reminder of the core lessons I am always trying to teach my sons and students: that taking chances is worth it, that bumping up against one’s own limits is immensely clarifying, and that painful experiences, including and perhaps especially our failures, bestow wisdom.
I landed in a classroom nearly by accident as an exuberant 21-year-old back in 1989. Not entirely sure where to go with my B.A. from the University of Michigan’s Honors English Program, I decided to do what two of my close friends were doing: teach for a year. So early in August, after packing all of my worldly possessions into my brand-new-to-me 1986 Corolla, I drove 1,400 miles from Ann Arbor to South Miami, from a busy university town to the three acres of grass and pink stucco that made up the campus of fledgling Trinity Episcopal School, from my post-graduation “Pizza Hut summer” into the beginning of my life’s work.
Those early years were insane: I taught six sections; I coached several sports I’d never played; I coordinated the outdoor program; I learned to be an advisor; I figured out how to deal with parents; I created curriculum from scratch; I taught in modified garages, modified trailers, a renovated parsonage, on makeshift sports fields, all while trying to figure out how to be an actual adult living far from family and home.
It should have been a train wreck. As a working class, first-generation college graduate with no formal teaching experience, the load should have been crushing. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t because I loved it. Even though I would return in the evening to my Waterford Point efficiency absolutely depleted, often collapsing onto my futon for the night still fully clothed in my sweaty coaching gear, I loved the creative demands and wholesome energy and moment-to-moment surprises embedded in teaching. I loved talking about books and writing and human nature with kids; I loved playing outside (my limited skills version of coaching) with kids; I loved traveling to the Keys and the Everglades with kids; I loved experiencing the wonder and magic of life with kids. I loved kids. Those kids and those years in South Miami made me a teacher. None of it felt like work.
Fast-forward 20 years. In November 2010, I was a few months into my 22nd year of teaching, a profession that I still loved. In my eighth year teaching upper school English at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School (Missouri), and my third year chairing the English department, I was also in a place I’d come to love. So what made me restless? What made me trade away a comfortable position in which I was highly regarded, well compensated, and appropriately challenged, for a giant question mark? What made me give up the students I knew, the colleagues I had befriended, the classroom I adored, the professional respect I had earned, the electives I had created, the Thoreauvian saunters I had trademarked, and the thrill of going “four up, four down” (teaching four successful classes in a row), for a leap into the unknown?
As an intuitive soul, I’d say a lot of this decision was fueled by two decades’ worth of trigger moments: the moment when an English teacher at my own high school asked me to speak about the topic of leadership at the National Honor Society Tea when I was a senior even though I had never led anything; the moment when the head who interviewed me at The Valley School of Ligonier (Pennsylvania) in April 1989 looked at my college résumé completely devoid of real teaching experience and said, “You might head a school someday;” the moment when the impressive young woman I met at the Klingenstein Summer Institute in 1996 said, “I feel as though talented women have a duty to seek promotion and advancement.” It was fueled by the department chair at my school in Kentucky who wanted to make me the chair of our tiny department and then mentioned in writing that I would make a great administrator in his farewell letter of reference for me; by the mentors and administrators at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School (MICDS) who encouraged and coaxed me and assigned me projects I didn’t initially think I could handle, and then did; by the friends at other schools — some of whom I myself had mentored — who started taking on administrative roles; by the rush I felt when taken seriously as the program coleader for our ISACS self-study process, and the coordinator of the MICDS experiential Mini-Term; by the leadership and curriculum conferences I attended across the country; by the undeniable fact that I was actually quite good at a lot of administrative tasks, whether I loved doing them or not; and, it needs to be said, by the competitive desire to prove that I, too, could succeed in roles that seemed so weighty and difficult and important. The list goes on.
In autumn 2010, I was harboring a troubling suspicion that I had passed up the chance to apply for the recently filled middle school division director position at MICDS out of sheer cowardice, and I was frustrated when I realized that my paperwork seemed better than many of the finalists then interviewing for the MICDS upper school division director post. Running parallel to all that, between 2005 and 2010 my interest in all things leadership seemed at times so electric and outside of me, that I felt an almost spiritual calling toward administration.
Suffice it to say, a few days after requesting and reviewing the somewhat unwieldy job description for the John Burroughs School director of academics position, I told my husband, “I have to take a shot at this.” It was a local opportunity, the timing seemed ideal, and I needed to find out, now or never, if I had the right stuff. After three hours of writing into my little PC while sitting cross-legged in a wooden booth at a local coffee shop, I had the application materials ready, and three days after submitting them, the head at Burroughs, Andy Abbott, called to say that I was a serious candidate.
This next section might be entitled “Holy Shit,” since that is the exact phrase I whispered to the head’s administrative assistant after handing her my signed contract in early February 2011. Events during the two months prior had engulfed me in a swirl of intensifying storm currents both thrilling and completely disorienting. After my December preliminary interview, my January get-to-know-you dinner, and my rescheduled-after-a-snow-day nine-hour campus interview, I wanted the job desperately. I wanted it for lots of good reasons, but I have to acknowledge, nearly four years after the fact, that once I put the interview wheels in motion, one of the chief forces driving me forward was good old fashioned pride. Simply put, I wanted to win.
And I did win eventually, but not right away, and not in any of the ways I could have predicted. That part comes later.
Early warning signs that my decision would cost me surfaced almost immediately. “You applied where?” several colleagues asked. “You’re leaving here to go there?” my students chorused. Savvy about many things and keenly aware of all kinds of MICDS history, I was woefully ignorant about the depth of rivalry between MICDS and John Burroughs. I had attended lots of contests between our schools, had seen all of the “Beat the Bombers” posters in the hallways over the years, and I knew that we competed for the same talented crop of sixth-graders coming out of the K–6 feeder schools. But because I am not native to St. Louis and because I was not a coach or an administrator at MICDS, I had no idea how deep and wide this rivalry stretched. The schools are a few miles apart and in lots of respects are profoundly similar, but I registered the vast cultural distance in the tight set of my juniors’ faces when they heard my news, in the reaction of one of my senior advisees when I wrote my new John Burroughs email address on the board (“You cannot write that school’s name in this room”), and in the despairing look on the director of admission’s face when I joked that “we’d be bumping into one another.”
Another early warning sign involved my baffling inability to voice my new job title. This went on from the moment I applied for the job until nearly my final day in it. “The director of what?” people would say. “What will you actually do?” “The director of economics?” several misheard me saying, “Is that like a development director?” “Will you do any teaching?” I was commonly asked. “I thought you loved teaching.” And my favorite question, from a tactless but ultimately prescient woman at our church, “Why in the world would they hire you to do that?”
Now keep in mind that as a 44-year-old professional woman long interested in leadership, I knew all about the glass ceiling, all about the gender gap, all about the dangers of self-limiting perceptions; I had heard the quip about it being “tough to lead a cavalry if you think you look silly on a horse;” I took Women’s Studies in college, I usually vote Democratic, and would likely be considered a mainstream feminist, so my problem was not, then and now, a lack of faith in my own abilities. I just found the whole title thing ridiculous. “I’m going to teach two sections of senior English and help out with some administrative duties,” I told the first set of parents I met at a John Burroughs admissions reception in April 2011. “I’ve been hired to help coordinate the academic program, including some curriculum oversight and faculty professional development.” “I’m a sort of academic coordinator.” The permutations continued. Even receiving a box of several hundred business cards with the correct title emblazoned on them in bright blue ink didn’t seem to help. “I feel like I’m announcing that I’m the Queen of England,” I told my husband.
Anyone who has signed a contract at a new school while completing the present year’s responsibilities at a current school will understand the stress involved in the spring months following my “Holy Shit” pronouncement. The stress was mirrored in other people’s initial reactions, but once the news settled and my replacement was named and my colleagues went back to more pressing matters, the stress became a monstrously inside job. An off-the-charts “F” (Feeler) on the Myers-Briggs personality scale, I felt the departing stress everywhere. I felt it while taking my 10th load of spent curriculum files down to the recycling bin. (“Wow, Ms. D.,” said my advisee Tucker, “this drawer is completely empty. There’s nothing in here.”) I felt it while making a tribute film for my advisees, a group that I had grown so close to over our four years together that they felt like my own children. I felt it when the students in my “good life” elective threw a party for me on the last day of class. (“Look, she’s tearing up,” Emily whispered.) I felt it during all of the closing events, especially when a favorite alum stepped into the faculty recessional at graduation to hug me. I felt it when my normally reserved friend Cathy came to my room and said, “I’m really going to miss you, Jill.” I felt it when my division head — a brilliant but fiercely taciturn woman — said just three sentences about me during the final faculty meeting. I felt it when the new folks in the business office accepted my tablet and “faculty exit form” with a brisk and clinical formality.
While I’ve been coached since childhood to develop “a thicker skin,” this depth of feeling in me is precisely what makes me an exceptional English teacher and (I’d like to believe) a uniquely compassionate person. Despite compensatory levels of grit and resilience and raw blue-collar determination, it probably goes without saying that my heightened sensitivity made things substantially tougher for me as an administrator. More on that soon.
Three of the qualities I bring to any job are a powerful work ethic, enormous efficiency, and a talent for organization. Between July 7 and the first week of school at John Burroughs, I read and absorbed hundreds of pages of archived material, met and interviewed close to 90 faculty members (sending summaries and updates about my findings to the other senior administrators), learned all kinds of practical information about how to tackle my laundry list of duties, and prepped curriculum for my two sections of senior English. My sons and husband, who is also a teacher, were at the pool and at playgrounds and at the zoo and on mini family vacations, but I was workin’, baby, driven by duty and accountability and a desperate desire to prove myself. I know I stunned some folks and they tried to help me calm down: “You don’t have to be here at 8:00 a.m. every morning,” Andy told me. “In the summer we’re more relaxed.” “You can wear shorts you know,” another colleague said, “We have an informal dress code here.”
One of the great gifts of the early weeks was having all of those conversations with faculty members. I learned that my new colleagues were smart, warm, funny, and creative. The stories that emerged taught me volumes about John Burroughs’s culture and also gave me a sense of the challenges ahead. Unlike MICDS, Burroughs has a faculty culture built around “autonomy,” a lean administrative structure with a long tradition of promotion from within, and a very small number of scheduled faculty and department meetings. I found out that lots of folks had been and still were uncomfortable with the addition of the new administrative role I had just assumed, seeing it as superfluous and even insulting, and had joked that the initials for director of academics might also stand for Dead on Arrival. My mentor’s main piece of advice to me was “lie low” — no sudden moves, he warned, just learn and absorb. Certainly this was wise advice, but at what point, I wondered, does “lying low” look like not doing anything? Wouldn’t lying low merely confirm the arguments of all of the folks who had claimed that this job was completely unnecessary? And how to square up my own ferocious energy and desire to make an impact with lying low? Collision course.
Folded into the mix of newbie stress and anxiety were two other factors. My older son, Liam, happily educated in our neighborhood public schools, K–6, had been admitted to Burroughs and was making the shift with me to begin life as a seventh-grader in the fall. In August, I learned that my mom, who lives in Michigan, had been diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer and would begin radical chemotherapy immediately. A few weeks later, when I traveled with several other faculty members down to Drey Land, John Burroughs’s “southern campus” in the Ozarks for three days of camping, team building, and orientation with the newly admitted eighth- and ninth-graders, I experienced nearly the same level of homesickness as Austin, one of the veteran ninth-grade buddies, who became so miserable he had to be driven home early. Sitting on the wide wooden porch listening to my new colleagues do what all long-term faculty members do — discuss students from the past, reminisce about funny things that had happened through the years, trade in-jokes and stories and memories from their deeply shared histories — I felt my stomach seize and my throat close over two repeating questions: “Where in the world am I?” and “What in the world have I done?”
“Things will improve when school starts,” my husband, Ric, reassured me. “You will fall in love with your new students and the balance will feel right.”
One of the realities of teaching a couple of classes as an administrator is sharing classroom space. I was scheduled to teach 27 seniors that first year, 14 in first period and 13 during second period. Something to remember here is that given my successful track record as a teacher at MICDS (“You’re like a rock star,” a student’s mom once exclaimed), and similar successes every other place I’ve taught, it never once occurred to me during my transition summer that I might have trouble connecting with my students at John Burroughs. All of my anxieties were pointing in other directions. School started, the kids seemed familiar, I nailed the opening lessons, we all enjoyed the “honeymoon period” of the first four days, and then spirit week happened.
Let me offer a visual here to set the stage. Although I sweat a lot during workouts, I have never had trouble keeping my clothing dry during ordinary life. But beginning during spirit week and continuing, believe it or not, through something like February of that first year, I started sweating profusely through whatever I was wearing. “How odd,” I thought. “Is this some kind of hormonal issue? Do I need a different antiperspirant? Am I wearing too many layers? Is the whole school’s cooling system malfunctioning?” Twice I actually had to change shirts after class I was so drenched. I knew things were getting bad when the head’s assistant, after glancing maternally at another set of giant soak stains in my snazzy beige jacket, whispered kindly, “Are you having trouble with your thyroid?” The truth, looking back, is that once spirit week happened and my teacher/student relationships also became problematic, my central nervous system went nuts.
During my eight years at MICDS, spirit week involved a pep rally, a bonfire, lots of posters and balloons, a series of dress-up days culminating in an MICDS attire day, a football team “run through,” and a whole slate of contests against John Burroughs School. Pretty typical stuff. I remember getting annoyed one year when the football players were overly rambunctious running through Olson Hall, and when I mentioned my concerns to the head coach, he sent the whole team back upstairs to clean up the torn streamers and spent balloons.
Spirit week at Burroughs started the same: “This all seems familiar,” I thought. The kids seemed a little zanier, and the atmosphere a little more carnival-esque, but I wasn’t overly disoriented — until Wednesday of that week: “red and green day.” “What a cool twist,” I thought. “Dress up in the opposing school’s colors.” Liam and I arrived, gamely attired in our red and green shirts, and the first group of freshmen I saw tipped me off: popped collars, khakis, blue sport coats, bowties, lots of pink and green, resort attire, high-end designer fashion. What “red and green day” really meant, I discovered, is “dress like your enemy day” — parody, that is, in the broadest possible terms, the formal dress and over-the-top wealth of your Ladue neighbors. As the week went on, the parody involved a fairly ambitious send-up film, an on-stage skit, an insulting T-shirt (which I let Liam wear once before sending to the trash), and an offending cheer.
Now to be fair, I have since experienced three more spirit weeks at Burroughs and the past two events all struck me as rather tame. But in September 2011, because I was still so firmly bonded with so many people at MICDS, and because I was also vulnerable and homesick and doubting and stressed and on high alert across so many channels, my reaction was anything but subtle.
I will spare you all of the details, but rest assured that things got worse for me that week before they got better, and before we hit week #3 I’m sure I had made the head of school, the principals, and more than a few key faculty members doubt my stability. I had also created what turned out to be an unbridgeable gap between me and many of the alpha figures in both of my senior English classes.
Meanwhile, I was working my fanny off, not just in those now stress-laden senior classes, but on several dozen other fronts as well. The trouble with a new position, I’ve discovered, is that it can easily become the dumping ground for tedious and time-consuming tasks that others have wearied of doing — including ordering and administering the eighth- and ninth-grade ERB tests; editing and supervising the publication of the curriculum guide; writing the minutes for each of the department heads’ meetings; and hammering out the logistics of the new art requirement. There was interesting work over the course of my 24 months: I did, for instance, enjoy coordinating the in-house ISACS departmental reviews, helping to hire and orient new teachers, visiting more than 225 of my colleagues’ classes, formally evaluating seven faculty members, traveling on 12 school-related trips (five of them to Drey Land), thinking creatively with multiple groups about how to revamp the existing faculty evaluation process, and participating in meaningful conversations about curriculum. But when I inherited a once-a-week, last period, seventh- and eighth-grade study hall from a teacher going on semester sabbatical in January 2012, I realized every Thursday during those rare and joyous 40 minutes with those dozen unjaded kids, that I hardly laughed anymore: that the work I was doing, however vital and meaningful to the health of the institution, brought me very little joy.
There were some joyful moments, especially working with and getting to know many colleagues, but I also looked at the clock way too much. When people ask me now why I spent so few years in administration, I always mention the clock. Understand me here: All teachers are keenly aware of time, and like all Type A’s, I have a finely honed internal clock, but this kind of clock watching was different. “Three more hours to go,” I’d calculate. “Oh my goodness, it cannot be only 4:00 p.m. How can I make it another hour?” I was busy, so that wasn’t the problem, but so much of the work turned out to be so intrinsically uninteresting to me that my days became organized by giant checklists — by self-imposed tasks to accomplish and cross off — and when all the items were checked, I was spent. Way too much of it, frankly, reminded me of work I had done during my undergraduate summers in Kalamazoo, Michigan, when the temporary agency I worked for sent me to banks and insurance companies and tiny law offices to complete data entry. That bad. Teaching has never once felt like that.
The other thing I mention when folks ask me “what happened?” is Liam’s face. A profoundly centered but also keenly attuned child, when he returned to my office each afternoon after finishing his incredibly full days as a seventh- and eighth-grader, Liam would look long at me and ask, “Did you have a good day?” Because he had made a firm adjustment to John Burroughs and wanted desperately for my end of things to work, every time he asked me that question his face contained such a mature and moving mix of hope and concern that I knew I had to find my way back to work filled with joy, if for Liam’s sake alone.
Sometimes people who know me well assume that politics or difficult conversations or the need to attend so many evening events played into my struggles with this job. And I have to admit that those things didn’t help. But in all honesty, even though I did have some testy and emotionally charged conversations with colleagues, and I did weary of the endless calendar of ceremonial events, and I did find some of the entrenched politics tiresome, those things all played far less of a role in engineering my core dissatisfaction than the nature of the work itself. When Andy Abbott, a very smart and kind man, asked me in February of my first year if I’d rather teach full time, I told him “no.” “I’m not a quitter,” I protested, “I don’t want to be a one-year wonder.” By December of year #2, though, it was obvious to both of us that the gig was up and even though I was doing the work, and no major balls had been dropped, and I had forged quality relationships with lots of faculty members, and my teaching was going better, and palpable progress had been made in lots of areas, a genuine shift was in order.
“When I find myself in the cellar of affliction, I always look about for the wine,” wrote 17th-century Scottish theologian Samuel Rutherford. My “let’s face facts” talk with Andy took place on December 17, 2012. In order to allow time to find and hire my replacement for the following fall, we decided to announce my decision to the other administrators in January and to the faculty in early February. I headed into that winter break staring straight into the reality sinkhole of another oncoming set of transitional months. The good news here is that, as Rutherford’s wry observation suggests, the actual treasure was all ahead of me.
Ric and I took our boys home for Christmas — home to Michigan and Indiana, that is. Having already shared the news with my sister and confidante, Tonya, I was hesitant to tell my mom. Even though she knew I had struggled in this position (the weepy late afternoon calls from my office every few weeks clued her in), I worried that she’d be disappointed in me. I remember sitting across from her, tongue tied and agitated, and saying, “Mom, I have to tell you something.” I realize now that her initial look of alarm had to do with my own gravity of delivery: I think she feared that one of us was seriously ill. “I’m going back to teaching,” I told her.
“Oh, thank goodness,” she said immediately, her face flooding with joy and relief.
“You’re not disappointed?” I asked, somewhat incredulous.
“Absolutely not,” she said, “I think this is a gift from God.”
Mom’s dear reaction was the first in a long stream of kindnesses to follow. Because he knows me better than anyone and because he knew that my key struggle during the next few months would involve self-excoriation, my husband gave me two inscribed journals and an engraved mug for Christmas. The first journal said: “She’s a dreamer, a doer, a thinker. She sees possibility everywhere.” The second said: “She makes the day brighter. She leaves a little sparkle wherever she goes.” The lip of the mug was engraved with the words from verse 29 of Proverbs 31: “Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all.” When I opened these things, I cried.
Speaking of crying, there are specific moments in one’s professional career that one will surely never forget. The late January 2013 administrative team meeting is certainly one of those moments for me. Every Wednesday morning, the three principals, the athletic director, and I met with Andy to talk about school-related matters, upcoming events, plans for the new buildings — practical affairs. The atmosphere in those meetings was productive and task-oriented, but authentic and jovial as well. Because Andy and I met biweekly as a twosome, we had already pinpointed this as announcement day. “I will tell them what I plan to tell the faculty next week,” I said to Andy. “Sort of like a rehearsal.” I drafted and redrafted my index card full of remarks, and even practiced them out loud in my basement. But on that Wednesday, partly because I’d been thinking about all of this for so long, and partly because during the first 35 minutes of the meeting my adrenal gland was on overdrive, and partly because I knew I was likely saying goodbye to an idea that I had nursed if only subconsciously for 20-plus years, as soon as I started reading my index card, I could barely speak. To their credit, my fellow administrators didn’t flinch or act horrified — they just watched and listened very patiently and let me choke things out. Midway through my croaky speech, the athletic director, Peter Tasker, left the table to get me a box of tissues. With apologies to Wordsworth, that particular “little, nameless… act of kindness and love” is something that I will never forget. As are the sincere words of encouragement offered by everyone around that polished table.
Telling the faculty turned out to be much easier. The rehearsal really had prepared me, and I managed to outsmart the adrenaline in my system by asking to be agenda item #1. “You’re wearing the same outfit as when you interviewed here,” noticed one of the guidance counselors. “Yup. Full circle moment,” I acknowledged, flatly.
The spring months weren’t as difficult as I had anticipated. I had a lot of work to do, for one thing, not just work related to my administrative post but preparation work for the two sections of seventh-grade English and the senior honors seminar I would pick up in the fall. Dozens of teachers sent me notes and stopped by to talk; a few even gave me small gifts. One of my favorite comments, and a wonderful reminder that words indeed have power, came from a retired English teacher who stopped me in the hallway while she was on campus subbing one day and said, “I heard your news, Jill. This all makes perfect sense to me. You will probably teach here for the next 20 years.”
I am detailing these moments here, partly to honor colleagues who were so thoughtful, but also to remind myself, and anyone reading this confessional, that the things we do and say when someone else is in a pit really matter. Each spring I read Salinger’s Franny and Zooey with my seniors. When we talk about what Zooey means when he calls his mother’s chicken soup “consecrated,” I remind them that anything offered to a hurting person in the spirit of compassion and love is holy. This past spring, in addition to listening to my seniors’ many examples, I had all kinds of personal examples to share with them as well.
In August 2013, I began my 25th year of teaching. I learned alongside 63 seventh- and twelfth-graders, advised seven seventh-graders, and had lunch at table #14 with a rambunctious crew of ninth-graders. I taught in my own classroom decorated with artwork and plants and holiday lights and photographs of authors and lots of quotations. I laughed a lot every single day. I hid from my colleagues for a while (“We never see you anymore,” “Where have you been?”) as I licked remaining wounds and graded stacks of essays and gloried in the familiar and somewhat paradoxical privacy of the classroom, but once spring rolled around, I was ready to share poems and take walks again.
My replacement, Macon Finley — a Burroughs alum, faculty member, and past parent and principal — came to my room in April 2014 and said this: “I want you to know that this is a very difficult job. And I think that, given your circumstances, you did it very well.” Her words meant a lot to me, and I’m grateful to her for saying them. But the farewell poem I received from seventh-grader Carly and the hugs I received from most of her classmates and the forlorn look on Hanna’s face on the last day of class and the smiles from my departing seniors at graduation and the tight “group hug” that my eighth-period seniors initiated, meant even more.
According to theologian Henri Nouwen, we are invited by God to “be at home in our own lives — to shed all [unhealthy] striving and pretense.” During the final weeks of class in 2014 there were one or two magical weeks during which every single one of my seventh-graders was fully engaged in our conversations about Flowers for Algernon, during which every single one of my 12th-graders was 100 percent plugged into our student-led discussions of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. I sat in my classroom, period after period, day after day, and felt a surge of gratitude for this gift I’d been given. Tyler and Matthew, reluctant to leave, were late to Math 7 every day; Jack, a completely different child than the one who came in the door in August, turned in every single assignment; Stephen, Remi, and Trevor asked if they could teach a second story from the O’Brien collection; Soo Min, Jake, and Rainey taught their O’Brien story with astonishing authority. My little band of advisees came up with all kinds of plans to welcome the incoming sixth-graders. And even though I knew that the year was coming to an end, and that this bubble of perfection couldn’t go on forever, and that eventually we’d all wake up to what time it was, I also knew that I had found my way back home.
“The best way out is always through,” Frost reminds us. Because “once you find where you want to be, practice begins.”