Every Exit is an Entrance Somewhere Else

Last winter, after sharing the news of my impending retirement as Head of Laurel in June, 2025, I felt heavy-hearted. Who will I be when I am not the Head of this school I love? I thought about Tom and Huck spying on their own funeral though I knew that was silly. I was still very much alive, but in the weeks following my announcement, I was a little glum.

In February, I attended a conference with other heads of independent schools. These are my people—my peers, the colleagues and friends who understand the complexity of leading a school because they, understand what it is to manage enrollment and fundraising, to celebrate a child’s triumph, to oversee construction projects and emergency plans, and to surf the vicissitudes of every school year. While each schools is distinct, the pace, the rhythm from one school year to the next, is familiar.

The speaker invited us to  play a game called Mad Tea, a type of speed-dating game . Questions flashed on the big screen at the front of the room. Each player found a partner and had a few minutes to answer the question, speaking without interruption until it was the partner’s turn. Then, we both moved to find a new partner. I spied Felicia and made my way around a few tables towards her. She was mid-way through Year 2–-the beginning of her first headship, while I was in the midst of Year 20 and will leave next year,  at the end of Year 21–-my majority, a friend teased. Felicia is tall and lovely, her dark hair rippling, her eyes dancing. She is a new friend.

The prompt invited us to recall a time in childhood when we felt free, felt our most authentic selves—though, I thought to myself, children who are being their most authentic selves don’t necessarily label that behavior as such. Felicia told me about being a little girl in the back yard in Baltimore, how she played alone, how she still, sometimes, slips off her shoes and walks barefoot in the grass—no siblings, alone. She recalled being on a swing—going high, high, and loving the sensation of the world whooshing by. We laughed. When it was my turn, I told her about carefully unlatching the screen of my sister’s bedroom window in our summer house–-the left window–-and lifting the screen from its frame to lean it up against the wall. Then, I’d clamber out onto the roof and sit on the green asphalt shingles. I leaned against the white clapboard, my journal in my lap, writing and listening, an unseen observer ,who watched the water moving across the lake in front of me and recorded snippets of conversation floating up from the porch. Harriet the Spy on a roof. To write what I heard or saw or felt was my way of making sense of the world when I was a not quite a teenager. The daring, secret parrt made the whole endeavor more fun. I wonder, still, if my mother knew of my exploits. I climbed out onto that roof well into my twenties.

The exercise ended, and Felicia and I smiled at each other and found our way back to our chairs. Our exchange cheered me. Perhaps it was Felicia’s gaze—direct, compassionate, vibrant, affirming—that reminded me that I am still here–alive, joyous, purposeful–and there are unknown chapters to discover, which may be thrilling. I want to model for the girls in my school that women’s lives are made of many chapters, that we get to compose our lives, leave before people hope we will go in order to explore new possibilities. Leaving will be hard. I already know I will be full of feelings, but in the months since the conference, I’ve recalled Felicia’s kind attention, her calm and loving presence, and I feel reassured, buoyed. Friends do that for one another.

And, in the quiet that follows the end of a busy school year–my penultimate year at Laurel–I recall lines I spoke on stage at seventeen. 

“Every exit is an entrance somewhere else,” the Player says in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guidlenstern Are Dead. I wore a floppy hat that I doffed, its purple plume sweeping the floor as I left the stage.

A year from now, I will exit a role I know well. My next entrance? I don’t know. Since my exchange with Felicia, I’ve been savoring the possibilities. My friend, Paul, says actors have to “live in the land of I don’t know.”   So, I’m cultivating a spirit of not knowing  I’m imagining time to wonder and read and garden and nap and travel and think. In a sense, I’m plotting a metaphorical return to the roof. I don’t intend to crawl out the window next fall, but I hope to reacquaint myself with the habits of that young woman who took time to listen and watch undetected, to record and imagine from her daring vantage point. In that place, she felt full of possibility—bold and free..