The Silence Around How Hard This Job Is Has to Stop — and I Am Choosing to Be the One Who Breaks It

I want to tell you what I am aware of when I sit down to write these posts.

I am aware that the things I am naming here — the loneliness, the structural weight, the accumulated cost of sustained leadership under insufficient support — are things that many people in professional positions above the principalship would prefer remain unnamed. Because naming them raises questions that are uncomfortable for institutions to answer. Because the acknowledgment that the role as currently designed is unsustainable for most of the humans who hold it would require a response that most districts are not prepared to give.

I name them anyway. For reasons that are specific and that I want to be explicit about, because the reasons matter.

The silence around how hard this job is has a cost. The cost is paid by the principals who believe, in their silence, that they are uniquely struggling with something that is structurally difficult for everyone. The cost is paid by the families who lose excellent principals to burnout before those principals’ impact could compound across the career they were building. The cost is paid by the students who spend years in buildings where the person at the top is managing their depletion rather than leading from their full capacity.

The silence does not protect anyone who matters. It protects the institution’s reputation. It protects the narrative that the principalship, as currently structured and supported, is a sustainable and dignified professional choice for qualified people. The evidence does not support that narrative. And I am done participating in the fiction that it does.

What the Silence Has Cost Specifically

It has cost new principals who spent their first year believing they were uniquely insufficient rather than structurally underprepared. The programs that produce principals — however well-intentioned — do not tell the full truth about what the role requires in its daily reality, because telling that truth would complicate the recruitment of people into a role that needs to be filled. And so the new principal walks in believing they are equipped when they are equipped for the formal version of the role, not the human version.

It has cost veteran principals who have been carrying the weight of this career without adequate support for years — who normalized the isolation and the depletion because the normalization felt like resilience and the alternative felt like admitting something the culture would use against them. The ones who are still in buildings right now, managing something that deserves better than management, because nobody gave them permission to need more.

Why I Built Principal Realities

Not because I have all the answers. I do not. I have specific knowledge that comes from having been inside this work — from the bilingual kindergarten classroom to the principal’s office, from the first day of my career to the decision to close that chapter and build this one. Knowledge that took twenty years to accumulate and that I believe is worth more distributed than kept.

I built it because the principal who reads something that names their experience honestly — who feels, even briefly, genuinely understood by someone who has been where they are — is less likely to leave a role they could have sustained with better support. Because the mentor I never had — the person who would have told me the truth about what I was walking into and what I would need to keep walking — that person changed nothing for me by not existing, and has the potential to change everything for the principals reading this by existing now.

What Real Talk Is

It is the conversation that happens in parking lots after conferences when people finally stop performing and start talking. It is the thing principals say to each other over drinks on the last night of a leadership retreat when the official programming has ended. It is the honest answer to the question nobody in a professional context asks directly: how are you actually doing?

Real Talk is that answer, in writing, published, available to anyone who needs it. Because the silence has been too long. Because you have been alone in it longer than anyone should be. Because the conversation that changes things starts when someone finally says the true thing out loud — and I am choosing to be that someone.

That is what we are building here. And we are just getting started.