Some days at the library feel less like a job and more like stepping back into an old photograph.
Alongside my work as a yoga teacher and coach, I also work at the library. It's not just any library. It's the branch in the neighborhood I grew up in. The one my brother and I came to after school when we were kids.
I didn't plan it that way. Life just folded back on itself and I ended up standing behind the same desk I used to walk up to.
When I moved back home, I thought I was just coming back to be closer to family. I didn't realize how many places were quietly waiting for me to return to them instead. How many rooms I'd walk into and feel my younger self still occupying them in some way.
The building has been remodeled. The carpet is new. The computers are faster. Kids DoorDash their snacks instead of pulling squished sandwiches and packs of fruit snacks out of their backpacks like we did. But the energy is the same. It's still the spot.
After-school kids and the in-house games
Every afternoon, like clockwork, the kids start to trickle in after school. They come in little waves. Backpacks half-zipped. Hoodies half-on. Somebody always laughing too loud. Somebody always quietly exhausted. They stop by the desk and ask the same question in the same way every time.
"Can we see the game list?"
We keep the in-house game list behind the desk. It's not fancy, just a laminated five-page list of about twenty-five games they can borrow without needing a library card to play at the tables. They always ask for the list like it's this big mystery, even though it's almost always the same games they end up choosing:
Connect Four.
Chess.
Checkers.
Mancala.
And Uno.
There's something about that moment, watching them crowd around the list, bargain with each other and decide who's playing what, that takes me right back to being their age. Back to me and my brother and our friends and our cousins spread out on the floor with a deck of Uno cards between us, dead serious about a game that wasn't serious at all.
Uno was high stakes for us as kids. There was trash talk. There were alliances. There were absolutely arguments about the rules.
Which is why, when the Uno Kids invited me to play one afternoon, it felt like being invited into a secret club I'd already been a member of for decades.
I'll set the scene. A decent-sized group of kids had chosen Uno for our monthly after-school youth board game meet up. I was one of two staff members in the room supervising that day. After three years of working there, I have a great rapport with the kids. One of them looked over at me and said,
"You wanna play?"
I hesitated for half a second. The adult employee part of me wanted to say, "Oh no, that's okay, you go ahead." But the part of me that grew up at this library, and knew exactly what it felt like to sit at that table, said, "Yeah, deal me in." They all started instantly trash talking me and I cracked up laughing. I knew I was in for it then.
We started to play, and within about two minutes, I realized I was in a different Uno universe.
There were new cards I did not recognize. Cards that made you switch hands with someone else. Cards that changed the direction more often. Cards that made you draw a number of cards I had never even heard of in connection with Uno. There were also "house rules" I'd never encountered, and they were all 100% sure they were the correct rules.
I kept laughing and saying, "Wait, you can do that now?"
They kept laughing and saying, "You don't know that? That's how you play!"
It was joyful and ridiculous and so strangely sweet. Because underneath all the newness, the updated deck, the extra, I'm-pretty-sure-made-up rules, the slang I had to mentally translate, it was still the same game. Draw two. Skip. Reverse. The feeling of ganging up on someone, in the most fun and loving way, with a well-timed card. The tiny triumph of going out first.
Things had changed, but somehow hadn't changed at all.
Full circle doesn't mean going backwards
That's the feeling I keep bumping into in this season of my life: everything changing and everything staying the same, all at once.
I live quite close to the neighborhood I grew up in now. The salon where my mom and I got our hair done most Saturdays is now a physical therapy clinic. The grocery store where we shopped every week is now a megachurch. The movie theater has been transformed into a restaurant and live music venue. Same places, new faces.
This is true for me as well. I'm still teaching, but not in a hot room or in a big city with rows of mats and a packed schedule. Now I teach in my home studio. My clients are on screens, many of them people I used to see in person in Chicago. Somehow, though, it still feels just as connected and personal, sometimes even more so. It's the same work, just in a different container. I have learned that anything can be what you want, because everything is what you make it.
I think of my family and how there were years when I only saw them on holidays, or a quick visit sandwiched between highways and less-than-ideal work schedules. Now I see them at barbecues and birthdays and on quick runs to the store. I get to hear their everyday stories instead of just the headlines. The people are the same; the level of closeness feels new.
Life didn't rewind. It just turned a corner and met itself again.
The kids I used to be
Working at my old library branch, I see my younger self all the time.
I see her in the girl who comes in every day, heads straight to the same table, and spreads out her homework even when no one told her she had to. I see her in the way the older siblings look out for the younger ones. I see my brother in the kid who plays it super cool and then lights up when he wins.
There's a particular kind of happy nostalgia in knowing I was one of them. That my brother and I once walked through those same doors with our heavy book bags and our after-school snacks, looking for a place to land for a couple of hours.
Back then, the librarians were just… the librarians. Grown-ups who said things and stamped things and helped us find books. I never pictured myself being one of them back then.
And yet, here I am. On the other side of the desk. Handing out the game list. Watching them argue about Uno rules and making sure everyone respects each other when the competition gets heated. Being, in some small way, part of the backdrop of someone else's childhood memories.
Practice rooms for a whole community
The more time I spend working at this library branch, the more I realize it isn't just the Uno kids who make this place feel like an extension of my yoga practice.
It's the older gentleman who comes in every morning to read the paper in the same chair. It's the teachers from the nearby high school, middle school, and Montessori school who pop in to pick up books for their classrooms. It's the families who show up for story time and stay to let their kids play with each other while the moms get to enjoy some much-needed adult conversation.
It's the church ladies who come to put flyers about chili cook-offs and clothes swaps on the bulletin board. The quilting circles and knitting groups that reserve the meeting room on Saturday afternoons. The neighborhood associations and HOA meetings that gather on weekday evenings. The people who need a quiet place to fill out forms, print something important, or just sit where it's comfy and safe for a while to charge their phones or stare at the wall uninterrupted.
Libraries are about books, yes. But they're also about this. About being a third place. A place that isn't home and isn't work or school, but still feels like it belongs to you a little bit.
From my cozy home yoga studio to the library branch and back again. From mats and Zoom squares to book stacks and game lists. Different spaces, different roles, but the same thread runs through all of it: making space for people to land, to breathe, and to be themselves.
What Uno keeps reminding me
Uno at the library is such a small thing.
A card game on a Tuesday afternoon. Kids arguing about whether you can stack a Draw 4 on another Draw 4. Me sitting there, half-librarian, half-twelve-year-old.
But it keeps whispering the same lesson to me:
As things change, they stay the same.
As things stay the same, they change.
The city I grew up in isn't exactly the city I live in now.
The library I came to as a kid isn't exactly the one I work in now.
I am not the same girl who used to sit on the floor with her cousins and guard her Uno hand like it contained the nuclear codes.
And yet.
The through lines are still there. The love of books. The craving for a safe place to land after school. The way a simple game can gather people around a table and make them feel accepted.
Sometimes "full circle" doesn't look like going back to where you were. It looks like meeting a past version of yourself in a new way, with more gratitude, more context, and wearing a lanyard instead of leggings as part of your daily work attire.
The Uno Kids don't know any of this, of course.
They just know there's a place they can go after school where someone will hand them a deck of Uno cards and give them a fist bump or a smile. They know there's a table, a few friends, and something safe and familiar waiting for them. And they know that's enough.
On the days when the world feels like too much and I'm not sure where I might land, that's enough for me too ♥