I wasn’t even involved.
That’s the part that got me.
It’s toward the end of the school year, and I open an email from a parent with the message that they were expecting to hear back from me, but with no other details about what they were expecting to hear about. My mind began to spin because their child wasn’t too disruptive in class and was passing, so I didn’t understand the urgency in their message.
That confusion plus burnout was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
In tears, I went to my admin, backpack on my shoulders, ready to take that day off. To their credit, they were supportive of me and we figured out it was about something else entirely, and not me and my classroom. But the pressure I felt to defend myself from something unknown was too much to bear.
I sat in their office, crying in a way that felt disproportionate and completely out of my control. Once I was able to calm down, I could see that my reaction was reflective of something much deeper than just stress. My emotional response to that email was the moment I realized I had moved into full burnout territory.
The burnout is real, but I had classes to teach, so I dried it up, took a few breaths, put my smile back on, and walked back into the hallway,
“Are you okay, Ms. Walter?” a student would ask.
“I’m good. Just tired.”
I said some version of that sentence multiple times this year. To colleagues who asked how I was doing. To administrators who passed me in the hall. To friends who knew better but accepted the answer anyway because we were all saying the same thing. Fine. Good. Tired. Almost summer.
The thing about performing fine is that it works…until it doesn’t. And when it stops working, it rarely stops in a dramatic, obvious way. It stops in a parent email that has nothing to do with you. It stops on a Tuesday afternoon when you realize you’ve been running on empty for so long you’ve forgotten what full felt like.
I’ve been a teacher long enough to know that burnout is not a personal failure. It is a structural one. We have built a system that asks educators, especially women, especially those of us who care deeply and show up fully, to absorb an enormous amount of harm and keep smiling. To take the anger that belongs to broken institutions and let it land on our bodies. To treat summers not as recovery, but as reset buttons, as if a few weeks of freedom can undo nine months of depletion.
It can’t. I know that now in a way I didn’t before.
So this summer I’m trying something different. I’m not going to perform recovery the same way I performed fine. I’m not going to make a rigid plan and execute it perfectly and return in August with a cheerful update about how rested I am. Instead I’m going to try to actually tell the truth about what happened this year, what it cost me, and what I’m doing about it.
The tools I’m reaching for are not complicated. Rest. Real rest. The intentional kind where I resist the pull to be productive. Therapy, which I’ve needed and kept putting off. Writing, because I can’t seem to figure anything out until I’ve written it down. And movement like walks, and spending time outside will help me get back into my body after a year of living entirely in my head.
I don’t know if they’ll work. That’s the honest answer. I’m not writing this from the other side of healing. I’m writing it from the beginning, which is the only place I actually am.
What I do know is that I can’t keep saying I’m good when I’m not. Not because positivity is bad, but because the performance of okayness is its own kind of exhaustion. And I am too tired to keep doing things that make me more tired.
This is me, just starting to name it. I’ll let you know what I find.
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