You have been waiting for permission. Maybe you have not called it that. Maybe it lives as a vague sense that you’ll take care of yourself when things slow down, or when this year is over, or when the district situation stabilizes, or when you feel like you’ve earned it. But underneath that language, what…
There are things you know that you cannot tell anyone. Not secrets in the dramatic sense — not intrigue or scandal. Just the ordinary, daily accumulation of information that the role requires you to hold privately, indefinitely, alone. The family situation behind a student’s behavior that explains everything but can be shared with no one….
It is not dramatic. That is the first thing worth saying about this, because the absence of drama is part of what makes it so hard to name. You have not had a breakdown. You have not made a catastrophic mistake. You have not stopped caring or stopped showing up or stopped doing the work…
There is a standard operating in school leadership that no one put in writing, that no district ever formally adopted, that no principal was explicitly told to meet — and that is destroying people quietly and has been for decades. The standard is this: the principal does not struggle. The principal does not ask for…
You wanted this. Let’s start there, because everything else in this post needs that as its foundation. You did not stumble into the principalship. You worked for it — the degrees, the certifications, the years in the classroom, the assistant principalship that was part stepping stone and part proving ground, the application process, the interview,…
There is a version of you that exists at work. Competent, accountable, steady, visible in the ways the role requires. This version shows up reliably, performs at a high level, and is known to most of the professional world as who you are. And then there is the version that used to show up at…
There is a specific memory that some principals carry — not a dramatic one, not a crisis moment, just a small one that lands with a weight disproportionate to its size. A child’s face at the dinner table. A partner’s question answered with something short and functional. A moment at a school event — not…
Think about what you performed today. Not performed in a pejorative sense — performed in the theatrical sense. The specific version of yourself you presented to each audience that arrived in your building. Composed and decisive for the staff member who needed direction. Warm and accessible for the parent who needed reassurance. Firm and boundaried…
There is a specific kind of day that principals know and rarely describe accurately, even to themselves. Not the day where things went wrong operationally — those are hard but they are at least categorized, at least named, at least acknowledged by the people around you as having been difficult. The day I’m describing is…
Nobody talks about the resentment. It is one of the most common experiences in the principal role and one of the least named — because naming it carries shame, because it seems incompatible with the image of the servant leader who is doing this work for the right reasons, because admitting it means admitting that…