Think about what you did emotionally today. You regulated a parent who came in furious and left calmer, because you absorbed the heat and reflected back something measured. You held a teacher who is struggling personally and kept their confidence while also navigating your legitimate concern about their classroom. You projected calm during a situation…
You sat down. You had twenty minutes — nothing urgent, nothing requiring immediate action — and you actually sat down. And within four minutes you were back up, or you were on your phone, or you were mentally composing an email, or you were running through tomorrow’s schedule, because just sitting there felt wrong in…
There was a reason you came to this work. Something specific — a moment, a belief, a version of the future you were moving toward. Maybe it was the student you saw yourself in once. Maybe it was the conviction that school could be different from what it was when you were a kid. Maybe…
It’s not any one thing. It’s all of it, all at once, all the time. The parent who sent the email you haven’t fully processed. The teacher whose performance you’re watching carefully and worrying about quietly. The budget gap you’ve been mentally carrying since October. The student you placed in a situation and aren’t sure…
There is a specific kind of depletion that is different from burnout, and it is almost never named correctly in the education leadership world. It’s the one that arrives not from doing too much work, but from absorbing too much pain. You know what I’m describing. The student whose home situation breaks your heart and…
You had a hard day. Not the kind you can describe as hard — the kind that is hard in ways you cannot explain to most people in your life, because they would not fully understand, and because some of it you are not allowed to share, and because the part you could share would…
It’s 1:14am and you are wide awake, replaying a conversation that happened at 2pm yesterday. Not replaying it productively — you’re not problem-solving or planning what you’ll say next. You’re just running it. The parent’s tone. The exact words you chose. Whether you should have said something different. Whether your silence in that one moment…
It’s 3:15pm. A teacher just knocked on your door with a question that, two months ago, you would have answered in thirty seconds. Today you stare at them for a beat too long. The answer is in there somewhere. You just cannot get to it. You feel something between exhausted and irritable, and you don’t…
It starts around 4pm. Or maybe after dinner. A tightness you can’t quite name — a low hum of something that wasn’t there this morning. The weekend isn’t technically over yet, but Monday is already in your chest. If you are a principal, you know exactly what this feels like. You have probably felt it…
It’s 10:47pm. You made every decision that needed to be made today. You held it together in every room. And now you’re lying in bed and your brain is still going. The parent email from this afternoon. The teacher who left your office looking defeated. The budget line that doesn’t add up. The call you…