My doctor retired.

And she deserved to. She put in her time, cared for generations of patients, and now gets to sleep in and drink her coffee slowly and take walks without checking her pager (do they still use pagers?). At some point, everyone deserves that.

But it left me needing a new primary care doctor, and I met her this morning.

She literally looks like she’s 15.

I had an immediate internal panic: Am I really old enough now to have a doctor who’s this much younger than me? I’ve had a few doctors around my age in the past few years, but this was different. She looked so fresh and shiny and new. But she was also confident and warm and… the head of internal medicine.

So I found myself talking myself down, reminding myself that she earned it. That youth doesn’t disqualify someone from knowing what they’re doing. That I was once green too.

I was 21 when I first stepped into a high school classroom. I was student-teaching seniors who were only a few years younger than me. Parents would side-eye me at Back-to-School Night like I was their babysitter, not their child’s English teacher. Students tested my limits with familiarity instead of respect. But all of them—parents, kids, colleagues—helped me practice. Helped shape me into the teacher I am now.

And sitting across from my new doctor today, I realized: maybe we’re all just here to help each other practice.

She gets to practice caring for someone who remembers landlines and cassette tapes and free street parking. I get to practice trusting a new generation of professionals—some of whom may have once doodled in the margins of their essays in my classroom. What a strange and beautiful full circle.

I wonder now, as a seasoned teacher with more than two decades under my belt, if my age makes people trust me more. If my graying hair and calm tone gives off the illusion that I know everything. But the truth is, part of being a good teacher is knowing that you never know everything. It’s staying open. Remaining curious. Letting yourself be changed by what you encounter.

That was my advice to the kiddo yesterday, too—he had his high school freshman orientation. He was nervous. So nervous. And I reminded him to go in open. To lead with wonder. To give it time.

And yet even with all my own experience—so many first days, so many new beginnings—I still struggle with that exact thing. Staying open. Going in with wonder. I guess we all forget how.

He came out of orientation quieter than usual. Heavy. He said the cliques were already forming. That everything felt big and unknown. That he cracked jokes because he was nervous, but maybe he shouldn’t do that anymore. It was like he suddenly felt that his confident middle school self wasn’t going to carry him the same way here. And he might be right.

He’s got more growing to do.

And I’ve seen that evolution happen in front of me thousands of times—but never from the insider’s perspective of a kid I’m helping raise. I’m learning a lot from him, too. About vulnerability. About tenderness. About how brave it is to show up as yourself when everything feels new.

Earlier this week, I met with my new department chair. I asked a lot of questions about how things work at my new school, and I could feel myself bracing a little—wondering if I’d have to defend what I’ve done for the past decade. But she wasn’t there to judge. She was there to give me practice: in curiosity, in openness, in imagining new ways of doing what I’ve always done.

Today I finally got the green light to move into my classroom. It’s been a slow process. The room wasn’t ready. The timing kept shifting. I had to keep adjusting. And it’s been… a practice. In patience. In surrender. In trusting that not everything needs to be handled on my timeline to still work out just fine.

Even the news I heard on the drive home—about paid parking coming to Balboa Park—brought me back to this idea. I had an old-person moment of sadness. Balboa Park was one of the last holdouts, one of the few places where you could exist in public without paying for it. And now, even that’s going away. San Diego’s getting more crowded, more expensive, harder to navigate. More people are contributing, and yet everything costs more. It’s easy to feel discouraged.

But maybe even that is practice: practice in presence, in adaptation, in holding onto what matters while letting go of how it used to be.

Maybe we’re all just giving each other practice—every bump, every shift, every transition. Helping one another build the muscles we’ll need for whatever comes next.