Dear journal,
There is a tension that comes with change that no amount of preparation seems to resolve. It sits somewhere between conviction and doubt, between what has been built and what must now be left behind. I have lived long enough in one place to mistake familiarity for permanence, to believe that the work I was doing might be enough to carry me forward on its own.
It is not.
Sixteen years is long enough for a place to shape you. Long enough to learn its rhythms, to anticipate its needs, to understand without needing to explain. I did not simply work there. I became a version of myself that only that place could produce.
And now I am leaving.
For years, I resisted the idea that my experience did not translate. It felt dismissive of the students, of the outcomes, of the long arc of work that rarely fits within a single school year. But systems do not evaluate impact the way individuals experience it. They measure what they can see, and for too long, my work existed just outside that line of sight.
So I am left with a choice that is less dramatic than it sounds, but no less real.
Charles Darwin wrote, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” I find myself returning to that idea now, not as a slogan, but as a kind of recalibration. Adaptation is not surrender. It is a recognition that survival, professional or otherwise, depends on the ability to respond to the environment as it is, not as I wish it to be.
And so I am adapting.
Yesterday, a former student came by. She had not finished when she was with me. Life had intervened: work, a child, time moving in directions that do not align with school schedules. But she came back to tell me she had passed the HiSET. She showed me pictures of her child, talked about others who had not made it, and stood there as living evidence that the work we did was never confined to a single year or even a single program.
When she left, I felt something I had not fully anticipated.
Not regret. Not even doubt. Something closer to grief.
Because moments like that are not transferable. They are tied to place, to time, to a specific kind of work that unfolds slowly and often invisibly. They are reminders that the timelines that matter most in this work rarely align with the timelines that institutions measure.
And yet, I cannot stay.
I am reminded of a line from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran: “It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.” That is closer to what this feels like. This is not a simple transition. It is not a professional adjustment that can be neatly explained. It is the slow and deliberate removal of something that has grown into who I am.
Gibran writes elsewhere, “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” There is a kind of clarity in that. What I feel in leaving is not simply loss, but the discomfort of being opened, of seeing more clearly what this work has been and what it has asked of me. The grief is not separate from the growth; it is evidence of it.
And there is something else. “And ever has it been known that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.” It would be easy to speak about this transition in practical terms. It would be easy to frame it as a step forward, a necessary move, a strategic decision. But that would miss the truth of it. I understand the depth of what this place has meant to me precisely because I am leaving it.
What I am leaving cannot be taken with me in any tangible way. The place, the students, the particular shape of that work, they remain where they are. But something of it endures. Not in form, but in understanding. In the way I see students. In the way I recognize struggle. In the quiet belief that redemption is always possible, even when it does not happen on a specific schedule.
If that is true, then this is not an ending in the way I once thought. It is a continuation, carried differently. “Life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.” The work does not disappear simply because the setting changes. It adapts. It finds new ground.
The question is no longer whether I will change, but what might grow because I am willing to.
Always,
Dave