Standout Reinventions: She Buried Her Best Friend, Broke Down, and Became a Kindergarten Teacher in Costa Rica. Grace Grossmann's Many Reinventions

What if the version of yourself you keep trying to get back to was never the one you were supposed to become?

Grace Grossmann has lived in England, Spain, Germany, and now Costa Rica. She’s been a journalist-in-training, a freelance writer, a yoga teacher for nine years, a well-being coach, and a kindergarten teacher.

She self-published Chill Out and Cheer Up: A Ten-Step Guide, a book she wrote while grieving her best friend. She then sat on it for four years because her inner critic wouldn’t let her release it. She finally did it from inside a mental health clinic.

She doesn’t call any of this a comeback story. She calls it a cycle.

Highlights

Reinvention isn’t a phase. It’s a practice.

Grace doesn’t describe her life as a single before-and-after. She describes it as ongoing.

“I’ve reinvented myself all the time. I feel like it’s a never-ending cycle, right? You’re always growing and becoming every day. There’s never a moment where you’re like, yeah, this is fully me.”

Most people wait for reinvention to be finished before they trust it. Grace’s story suggests the opposite. You don’t arrive at yourself. You keep stepping into higher versions of it, over and over, for the rest of your life.

The book almost never came out.

Grace wrote Chill Out and Cheer Up while grieving her best friend, who struggled with mental health his whole life. She finished it years before she published it.

“I didn’t self-publish it for four years until I was in the mental clinic and I was out of my mind, like of boredom and just like horrible thoughts, suicidal thoughts. I was like, well, there’s no better time than now.”

That’s the part the highlight reel skips. The book that “changed everything” for her readers almost died in a drawer, because her inner critic told her no one wanted to hear it. She published it anyway, from the lowest point of her life, and it became the thing readers said felt like talking to a friend.

The inner critic isn’t protecting you. It’s shrinking you.

Grace is direct about what imposter syndrome is actually doing.

“Your imposter syndrome and your inner critic is just trying to protect you from being the best you... it’s like, no, go back into your shell, shrink back down again.”

If you’re sitting on something you’ve written, built, or started because a voice in your head says you’re not the one who should be saying it, that voice was never protecting you from failure. It was protecting the smaller version of you it’s used to.

Living in different countries taught her who she actually is.

Grace left England for Spain at 18. Later, Germany. Now Costa Rica.

“When you live in different countries and different cultures, you get to know so many of yourselves, if you know what I mean. You can be who you want to be.”

Nobody needs to move across the world to reinvent themselves. But if you’ve ever felt like your environment was the thing keeping an old version of you alive, Grace’s experience shows you the way. Change the room, and you find out which parts of yourself were actually you, and which parts were just the room.

Being a “spaceholder” for everyone else eventually broke her.

Yoga teacher. Well-being coach. English teacher. Every role Grace has held has been about giving other people room to grow.

“I’ve always been a spaceholder... and hence also why I had a breakdown, because I think I’ve always been a spaceholder for the past decade, and I never knew how I could take up space myself.”

This is the part of the healer’s story that rarely gets told. You can’t hand out something you’ve stopped giving to yourself. Grace’s breakdown wasn’t a failure of her calling. It was the cost of doing it without taking care of herself too.

Rest is necessary if you want to be productive.

Grace’s Substack writing centers on rest, and she’s specific about why.

“In that rest, you can be your best and show up as your best... when we go slow, we actually soften smarter.”

Most people treat rest as something they’ve earned after the work is done. Grace treats it as the thing that makes the work possible in the first place. Not a reward. A requirement.

The small things were never small.

At 30 Grace became a kindergarten teacher, and found herself paying attention to what young children notice without trying.

“It’s funny, isn’t that beauty of life that we’ve forgotten because we’re all just so in our own worlds... Little things is also a chapter in my book. And the little things have always excited me.”

A butterfly. The taste of your food. A tree outside a classroom window. Grace doesn’t romanticize simplicity. She just recognized that most adults have trained themselves out of noticing anything that doesn’t come with a task attached to it.

You can dance with discipline instead of fighting it.

Grace rejects the idea that structure has to be rigid to work.

“I like to think I dance with discipline now, because when I was going through mental health issues, the lack of structure was really hard.”

She keeps routines and creates rituals but she doesn’t treat a missed habit as a failure, and she doesn’t force her body into a schedule that ignores how she actually feels that day. Structure gave her safety. It just stopped being allowed to run her life.

Closing Reflection

Grace Grossman has been an aspiring journalist, a freelance writer, a yoga teacher, a well-being coach, and a kindergarten teacher. She’s grieved a best friend, broken down completely, and rebuilt herself in four different countries. And she still doesn’t consider any of it finished.

“There’s no need to have to explain yourself or want to optimize yourself, but rather knowing already as you are and embodying that is the biggest part.”

Reinvention was never about arriving somewhere permanent. It’s about trusting that the next version of you is already trying to come through, the same way it always has.

If you’ve made a bold change: a move, a career shift, a creative leap, and you think your story could inspire others, I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment and tell us about your reinvention.