As the School I Love Closes, Here's How I'm Turning Loneliness into Connection

And the several questions I had to answer to move forward.

Olu Ayo

Jan 12, 2025

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Welcome to Writing Under the Palm Tree. We’re glad you’re here. We’ve saved you a seat on the proverbial grass.

This week, we’re discussing solitude vs. loneliness. How do we navigate both to live a full life?

My school is closing.

Returning to work as a resource teacher has been a nice change, but it’s also been revealing. Instead of leading a classroom, I now co-teach in another classroom.

There is a sparse fragrance in the air now, a stillness, that interrupts my train of thought when I walk upstairs to my desk.

The middle school where I have taught for half of my career will be closed for a full academic year, per the district-wide plan, and then converted into a K-6 elementary school.

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I have tried and tried to wrestle into submission my thoughts, my raw reactions to this inevitability, to reconcile the irreconcilable.

In the end, all I feel is adrift. Alone.

I am not alone in feeling isolated.

Loneliness is a deep and persistent reality of modern life.

According to research cited by Derek Thompson of The Atlantic:

Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period…going back to 1965.
Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined.
From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the American Time Use Survey…
Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more than 35 percent.
In 2023, Vivek Murthy, Joe Biden’s surgeon general, published an 81-page warning about America’s “epidemic of loneliness,” claiming that its negative health effects were on par with those of tobacco use and obesity.

In many ways, I am fortunate. I found family, acceptance, Black and Brown joy, and intelligence (emotional and intellectual) like I’ve never known before in this red brick and cement school building.

Within these walls my feelings of isolation, of not quite fitting in, abated.

Here I was, the following school year, standing in the remains of time, feeling its march to a peculiar finality.

I may never again be in this space, feel this level of in-person community, support, empathy, joy, curiosity, activism, friendship.

None of this is logical, but that does not lessen the urgency, the tightening hold the emotions have around my chest.

I will teach again at another school. I will seek out and likely find another vibrant, dynamic, diverse, and inspiring community to contribute to.

I just can’t say if it will ever feel the same, if whatever intangible magic that courses through this place and warms this unique coalition of leaders, students, educators, and supporters, will be found anywhere else.

As I watch time stream past me, me, a mottled rock trying to hold it back, slow it down, I think of the famous Dr. Seuss quote, that goes something like, “Don’t cry because its over, be happy it happened.”

And God knows, I couldn’t be happier.

I couldn’t be luckier to have been a part of this school’s final chapter, to be a memory of, a representation of, positive change to my students, an unrelenting source of encouragement, a person with unshakable belief in their boundless potential as humans.

It’s an honor to be that for them in this all too dismissive world.

The Night Before Ritual: From Scattered Writer to Morning Creator

Olu Ayo

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Moving through the hallways that before had dozens of laughing, joking children walking through it, I heard nothing; it was just me and a smattering of other resource teachers.

This was not solitude. This was loneliness. Solitude you choose.

This stillness, the unsaid memories, the unseen hopes chose me. They chose to follow me around, and they made for melancholy company.

What choices could I make?

I have an impulse to sit, lean back, and let my eyes sweep my too-silent room, fall on my untouched books, my unused chairs—and see the now, the present, as all there is, and mourn what was.

What if I chose to do the opposite, to take a deep breath, let it out and rise?

What if I hosted or co-hosted a student club, one about books or sports, or music, or poetry, or mindfulness, or…the list goes on?

What if I rejected loneliness’s choice, spurned its preferences, shrugged off its weight, and rose?

What if in the morning, instead of coming into an empty classroom that I remembered not long ago as full, as bright, as buoyant, as hopeful, as empathetic, I instead checked in with my current and former students wherever they were in the building?

What if I created a new morning ritual, a ritual of connection, engagement, and support?

What if I chose to get to know all my students even better than I did last year?

What if the memories I set out to make—the moments that will tilt up in glimmering flashes of possibilities—are among the best I have ever had in my teaching career?

What if loneliness is a two-way street? It makes its choice, then you make yours.

What if I turn away from my empty classroom just before my heart breaks—while the cracks are still forming—and find the young people that inspired me to dedicate my life to teaching reading and writing in the first place?

I have to believe that pursuing the answers to these questions will make a real and gorgeous difference.

Loneliness is a real thing.

I often wonder if it is the cold, mercurial center of my high-functioning depression (a topic for another post).