On Breaking Down in Order to Rebuild

A final farewell to a place that has changed me, and the painful, necessary business of endings

It’s dark and rainy outside my window this morning, and I’m grateful for it. After a weekend of big emotions and strange energy here in D.C., I appreciate the gentle reset—the rinsing away of residue, the moment of stillness to reflect.

On Saturday, we bid farewell to the neighborhood school where I taught for many years, and where both my children attended. This summer, Brent Elementary begins a two-year modernization process. The building, which I first entered fourteen years ago as a floundering newbie teacher and which holds so many of my most significant memories, will be torn down, renamed, and rebuilt over the next two years. It’s a chapter I knew would eventually end, and now that ending has arrived.

As TC and I walked the long hallways where Jack once crawled as a baby, we paused outside my former classroom. “It’s been such a joy,” he teared up, “to watch your career unfold within these walls.”

If I had steeled myself properly for the sentimentality of the occasion, I couldn’t help but succumb to it just then. Saying goodbye to Brent is so much bigger than saying goodbye to my memories as a teacher. It’s an entire chapter of life - one in which we are the parents to small children, in which our community helped us stand back up and regather after tragedy, and in which we formed friendships that we’ll carry for a lifetime. These walls contain a long, hard, glorious fourteen years.

And we’re just a few of many who have called this place home.

A few minutes later, I heard my name being shouted by adult-sounding voices. I turned around to find a group of my former students, in their 20s now, all doing exactly what I’d been doing - awing at their memories inside the building. Several of these kids are the ones you read about in Love You Hard. They were the first classes I taught after my absence as a caregiver, and they have fulfilled every aspirational prediction I made for them: Ivy League schools, world-class internships, performing on stages worldwide. More importantly, they’re just as kind, clear-eyed, and motivated as they were at 9 years old. They are truly changing the world.

Honored to have taught these extraordinary humans.

And what a world they’re inheriting.

My secret hope is that they’re more optimistic about it than I am. Between the Brent farewell, my keen awareness of the parade taking place downtown, the news of the horrific assassinations in Minnesota, and the weight of our upcoming move, my heart was at capacity this weekend. Outside, the air was thick with humidity and smoke, creating a surreal atmosphere. Was it the end of the world? The beginning? Or somewhere in the unknowable middle?

Here’s what seems to be true: Things are breaking down. People are breaking down. Systems are breaking down. None of this is necessarily bad, but it is necessary because the old ways no longer serve us.

It’s hard to be American right now (suffice it to say, it’s always been hard for many Americans). Never before have we faced such a steep socioeconomic divide. Never has it been harder to parent, ensure a decent quality of life for one’s family, or rest one’s head at night. Things in America have to change because they cannot sustain themselves as they are. But change is rarely easy or painless.

I don’t have to list all the ways life is hard or our systems are broken because whether it’s healthcare, gun violence, unemployment, or housing scarcity, I know each of us feels the impact of that brokenness in our everyday lives. Acknowledging it, however, is one tool I rely on to connect with my own sense of empathy, especially in moments when I cannot reconcile opposing viewpoints. Americans may not diagnose the problems in the same way, but struggle is a throughline in our shared humanity.

I’ve been quoting Alain de Botton’s brilliant book, The School of Life, plenty lately. Still, I couldn’t resist sharing this insight about breakdowns, which feels not only personally applicable but also relevant to society at large.

“A breakdown is not merely a random piece of madness or malfunction; it is a very real - albeit very inarticulate - bid for health and self-knowledge. It is an attempt by one part of our mind to force the other into a process of growth, self-understanding and self-development that it has hitherto refused to undertake. If we can put it paradoxically, it is an attempt to jumpstart a process of getting well - properly well - through a stage of falling very ill… Our crisis, if we can get through it, is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and constitutes an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis.”

I’m choosing to let these words form a little nest of hope within me. We cannot escape the cyclical nature of life. We will fall ill, things will break, chapters will end, and buildings will be demolished. As we grieve what was, we can choose to invite space for what can be—a truer, healthier way of existing, an opportunity to grow in new directions.

I fear that our nation’s healing will not be swift, that we will sustain more suffering before we can properly become well again, and should that be the case, I pray that we take good care of ourselves, tending first to our mental health, then that of others as we navigate the bumps.

With that in mind, your homework this week is mandatory: tune into a gentle vibration. Mother yourself, as Miley Cyrus recently put it.

When I was young, and my mother was a teacher herself, her nightly ritual was to tuck herself in with a book, a cup of Sleepytime tea, and the peanut M&Ms she used to hide in her nightstand drawer. One evening, my dad thought it would be funny to surprise her by setting up my sister and me in the same way. Decades later, I finally understand the necessity of these nurturing rituals.

And, if you feel so obliged, please share your loving rituals in the comments. Help others find gentleness and self-care. Let’s tend to ourselves so we can be good for others.