There’s a kind of tired that has nothing to do with how many hours you worked. Not from early mornings or late nights, though those happen too. This tired comes from something harder to name. It comes from being the one responsible for other people. For their learning, their safety, their sense of being okay. It comes from being the person in the room who holds it all together while you’re also doing the actual work of teaching or leading.
This is emotional labor. It’s real work. It depletes real energy. But it doesn’t show up on a timesheet. It barely shows up in evaluations. It just accumulates quietly until one day the weight becomes impossible to ignore.
I remember sitting in my car in a school parking lot about three years into my principalship. I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t burned out in any dramatic way. I was just empty. I’d spent the day holding things for a lot of people, and there was nothing left. I sat there for a while. Probably ten minutes. Nobody knew.
I remember thinking: nobody sees this part.
Not the families I’d reassured that morning. Not the teacher I’d coached through a hard observation. Not the student I’d spent forty-five minutes with who was in real crisis. They’d gotten what they needed. What I had given was invisible. And that invisibility is one of the heaviest parts of this work. You don’t get to show your effort the way a surgeon does or an architect. The moments of real human connection, the quiet steadiness that keeps a classroom or building functioning, leave no trace.
I'm not saying this to build resentment. The meaning in this work is real. It coexists with the weight. But I think a lot of educators carry that exhaustion silently because there's no socially acceptable way to name it without sounding like you're complaining. You love the kids. You chose this. You're supposed to be energized by the mission and the "Remember your why" that gets handed to you every time you're struggling. And you can be all of those things while also being emptied by the day. Both things are true at the same time.
One thing to try this week:
Think of one thing you gave this year that nobody saw. Not the lesson plans or the meeting agendas. The invisible labor. The worry you carried home on a Friday. The student situation that followed you into the weekend. Name it, just for yourself. You don’t have to do anything with it. You just have to acknowledge it was real.
A note from the principal's chair:
The most capable educators I’ve known are often hardest on themselves. They hold others with great grace and hold themselves with very little. If you wouldn’t judge a colleague for being tired, don’t judge yourself for it either.
See you in two weeks.
David
educatorlifelab.com