There is a decision you made — maybe last week, maybe last year, maybe further back than that — that you still carry. Not because you made the wrong call. You may have made the best call available to you with the information you had. You carry it because it involved a child. Because somewhere,…
Think about the last time a teacher came to you struggling. Maybe they were overwhelmed by a difficult class. Maybe they’d made a mistake they were beating themselves up about. Maybe they were just having a hard stretch and couldn’t see the end of it. Think about what you said to them. You probably said…
You come home and you cannot stop moving. Not because there is something urgent. Not because there is a task that cannot wait. But because stopping feels genuinely uncomfortable in a way you don’t have a clean name for — a restlessness, a low-grade tension, a sense that if you sit down fully something is…
You have been doing this for years. You have the title, the experience, the track record. And you still lie awake sometimes wondering if you are actually good enough for this role. Not in a vague, philosophical way. In a specific, 11pm way. Did I handle that situation correctly? Was that the right call? Do…
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…