The Day I Stopped Pretending I Was Okay — and What Changed When I Did

I am not going to tell you the specific circumstances. Not because they are not real and not because protecting them serves me in some way. Because the specific story matters less than the experience it names — which is the experience of a professional life built so thoroughly around the performance of competence that the performer and the person inside them have become estranged.

There was a day when the performance stopped working. Not because I chose to stop it, not because a specific event forced it — because the gap between what I was projecting and what was actually true had become wide enough that sustaining it required more energy than I had left to give it.

And what I found on the other side of stopping was not the collapse I had been afraid of. It was something more complicated and ultimately more useful: clarity. A specific, honest accounting of where I actually was, what the work had actually been costing, and what I actually needed to keep going in a way that was sustainable rather than just heroic.

The performance of okay is one of the most energy-intensive things a school leader does. Not the leadership itself — the performance of being unaffected by the leadership. The energy that goes into that performance is energy that comes from the same account as the energy for the actual work. When the performance account is overdrawn, the work account is too. Stopping the performance is not collapse. It is recovery of resources that belong to the work.

What the Stopping Actually Looked Like

It looked like saying a true thing to one person in my life who had the capacity to hear it without using it against me professionally and without amplifying it beyond what I intended. I said: I am not okay. I have not been okay for a while. And I am not sure what okay looks like from here.

Not in a staff meeting. Not to my supervisor. Not in a format that had professional consequences. To one person who knew me outside the role. That is where it started.

The sentence was three sentences. It did not contain a plan or a solution or a next step. It contained the truth. And saying the truth — hearing myself say it in language that was not managed or qualified or positioned — began something that the months of performing fine had not been able to produce: an honest accounting from which actual decisions could be made.

What Changed After the Stopping

Not immediately. The situation did not change in the week after the honest conversation. The school was still the school, the demands were still the demands, the specific things that had produced the depletion were still present.

What changed was the relationship to those things. They went from a private experience being managed under a performance to named things I was working on — which is a different psychological position. Named things are smaller than unnamed ones. The weight of the secret is part of the weight. When it is no longer a secret — at least not from yourself, not from the one person who needed to know — the weight is distributed differently.

Over weeks, the honesty produced other changes. Decisions that accounted for my actual state rather than my performed state. Conversations I had that I would not have had while performing competence. Help I accepted that I would not have accepted while presenting self-sufficiency. Slowly, the honest position produced a more sustainable position.

For the Principal Who Is Still Performing

The performance is not indefinitely sustainable. You already know this — it is part of what the performance is protecting against knowing fully. At some point the gap between what you are projecting and what is true becomes wide enough that the projection collapses rather than being released.

The release — the chosen stopping — is more dignified than the collapse and provides more agency over what comes next. Choose it. Not publicly, not dramatically. Find the one person in your life who can hold it. Say the true thing. Let the accounting begin.

That is where the reset starts. Not in a framework or a system or a program. In the honest sentence said to the right person. Start there.