I don’t claim Santa Clarita often.

I have a complicated relationships with my hometown.  It is a place where I struggled to find self-acceptance, a sense of true belonging, and where I lost my mother.  But, it is also the place where I grew up, that inspired my understanding for the importance of educators, where many people close to my heart still live and teach and raise their families.

This morning there was a school shooting at Saugus High School. A very dear friend of mine from childhood works in this district. When I first heard the news and before I could google search that she worked at another school in the district, I frantically texted to make sure she was alright. She was. She was at the district office in a training.  She was returning to her site.

It is exactly one month before the 7th anniversary of the shooting at Sandy Hook school where my nephew was a second grader at the time of the shooting.   The blog post I wrote On Trauma and Teaching is a post about collective trauma that I returned to this morning.  The following Monday, I wrote about the importance of humanization as a society, in No Ordinary Monday.

Last month, I wrote about our own campus lockdown in another post What does it mean to be “okay”? Three days later, as I thought about how to support my students through our collective trauma, in Reflections on Today’s Community Circle & Doing My Best, I talked about the autopilot I go into after having experienced so many incidents of violence so close to me and people I love, and about trying to bring restoration through acknowledging our shared humanity and our collective trauma.

So, here I am, less than 6 weeks later, facing another moment of collective trauma, this time in my hometown. And I am doing what I know to do to move forward, to write, to share, to think through healing, to advocate for a greatest emphasis on our shared humanity.

But the breaking is hard. It is especially hard on a Thursday, when I have regular life scheduled until 8:30 pm tonight. I let my colleague and friend run the meeting I had at 10am so I could sit in my dark office and write this post. But at 12, I’ll need to go to class, at 2:30, I’ll need to be on a call, at 4, I’ll need to teach, at 7, I’ll need to go to a PTSA meeting.  And I will go, I will do, I will move forward, because what else is there to do?

In the midst of it all, life continues to move forward. I continue to make mistakes (including two I realized while I was writing this post). I continue to struggle to be my best self.

But how? How do you just keep moving forward when the world keeps breaking for those around you? How do you keep picking up pieces that seem to be smaller and smaller and more fragmented each and every time? How?

Asking for a friend.  Asking for myself. Asking for us all.