“Moving on is easy. It’s staying moved on that’s trickier.” – K. Klemer
Something strange is going on. It’s mid-August, and I am not in a flurry of butcher paper and books and PD’s. There’s someone new in that apartment on Wayne Avenue. I am not having a drink at Lou’s or Rock Bottom, nor am I breathing the fresh ocean air. Someone else is planning out how they will decorate the walls of 3085. There are new/different names on my students’ rosters.
And me? I’m sitting neck deep in social theory books from my pre-reading list for Cambridge, and running around securing funding for the start-up.
They are two different lives.
Today was the teacher retreat for the high school I used to work at in Miami. Even writing the phrase ‘used to’ feels strange, other-worldly. The summer felt normal, as I was on a break the way I would be during a normal school year, with a summer job to tie me over. But now that summer is coming to a close, and the number of texts and calls and emails I receive from students increases, the reality of not returning hits me just as hard as the initial physical leavetaking did in June.
I have found over the years that there is a significant difference between wanting to go back to what you were doing because you honestly made a mistake with your new path versus the difficulty of continuing on the road of moving forward with new journeys. The two can seem and feel eerily similar. When remnants of the familiar float to the surface, it makes sense to grab at them for a variety of reasons. You may not feel like you were finished with your time in that place, you may not know what will become of those you left behind, or you may be filled with fear for the journey ahead. Or a combination of the three. I even want to insert myself into the narrative from my distance: Hey, read this book. What will you do with that student? Oh that’s so _____ to do that. But I’m no longer a central character in that story. I have to open the pages of my new novel, and archive the former.
My life looks and feels much different now, but not in a bad way. I made the decision to leave, and I still stand by it. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be on my new path. And I am very excited. I’m exactly where I’m meant to be. YOU are exactly where you are meant to be.
Because at the end of the day, all decisions are rooted in truth and want–the truth of what you know you need to do and the want to go out there and find it. So you owe it to yourself to not just move forward into this new journey, but to reaffirm your decision each day by staying moved on and committed to this new way of being and doing and living.
Odelia Younge 
[…] Staying in Miami would have been easy. I could have taught anything I wanted to, and it would have been an entire environment that I knew the basic ins and outs of from days of tracing the same paths of work and personal life. I had a close group of friends, who defied my claim that I would not make closer friends than the ones I made in college. But it wasn’t where I saw myself long-term. And I wasn’t being developed in the ways I wished to be developed. I felt like a placeholder. I looked great where I was, but I did not have to be there. So I made the difficult decision to leave, and to go in search of, once again, that something that would help me to continue to evolve and grow. My students were growing, but I was not, except in the sense of understanding how to teach reading better, but that was not enough for me. So in a week when I leave for school, I will start to figure out what those next steps look like, but I am content in my thinking that I will feel that I am exactly where I am meant to be. […]