Teachers, You Made It. So, Why Doesn't If Feel Like It?

 You Made It. So Why Doesn't It Feel That Way? 

The school year is over. You made it. So why doesn't it feel the way you thought it would? 

If you are sitting in the first week of summer feeling exhausted, disoriented, or guilty for doing nothing — this episode is for you. What you are feeling is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is what happens when a body and a mind that have been holding on since August finally get permission to let go. 

In this episode, Kim opens up about her own experience stepping fully out of the school system for the first time in 28 years — and what the crash felt like even for someone who has built her entire work around naming this exact thing. 

We are talking about what the crash after the school year actually is, why it hits harder than most teachers expect, and why it almost always goes unnamed. You will hear about Leisure Sickness — a real, documented response to sustained stress — and why the exhaustion you feel right now is not tiredness. It is your body coming out of high alert. 

This is the first episode of June, and the beginning of a month built around one idea: joy on your own terms. But before we can get there — we have to name what is happening right now. 

Just Name It. That is where the shift starts. 

We’re not here to fix.
We’re here to notice. 

If this helped, pass it to another teacher who might need it. 

Until next time… 

give yourself the same care you give everyone else.

 ~Kim 🌿 

Transcript

0:00

Hey teachers, I wanted to share something with you guys today. I posted this podcast a day later than normal because I wanted today to be my first podcast in my new journey. For the first time in 28 years, guys, I'm not going back. Not in August, not to a building, not to a system. I kind of expected today to feel different. I guess I expected to feel that relief from years of holding on to so much. I kind of expected to feel lighter, but I don't feel lighter. I expected that exhale we talked about all in May, and that's just not what I got. What I got instead was quiet, like super quiet. And underneath that quiet, I feel exhaustion. The kind of exhaustion that is not fixed by getting a good night's sleep. And I gotta admit, that kind of surprised me. I mean, I thought it would be different. You know that feeling when the last day finally comes, the children are gone, you wave goodbye to the buses, and your mind hasn't received that notice. You're home, the bell isn't ringing every 45 minutes, you don't have anywhere to be, and then your brain. Oh my goodness, our brains is still running, you know, the schedule. You know, that schedule where you know it's time for Susie to get her meds, and you're not looking at the clock or anything, you just know it because that's your schedule. Still moving through the day the way it has moved through every day since August. Still waiting, guys, for that very next thing to happen. And if you're on summer break, have you woken up this week and just for a split second, tiniest second, thought? What am I supposed to be doing right now? Have you felt guilty? Even a little when you realize you had nothing to do? Have you slept more than you expected or not slept at all? Because your body is finally letting go something it has been holding for 10 months. Hey teachers, it's not a problem. This is not a sign that something's wrong with you. This is what I call the crash. And most teachers never see it coming. Teachers, today we're gonna name that, alright? Welcome back to Teaching Without Losing Yourself the podcast. I'm Kim. After 28 years in education, I realized I couldn't give teachers what they needed within the system. So I decided to support teachers from outside the system instead. That's why this podcast exists. This is After the Bells Beyond the Box, a moment made just for teachers, even on the move. Everything we talk about here is built around this simple belief. Teachers, you can stay in education without losing yourself in the process. Our goal is always to help you see what is getting in the way of that so you can see things more clearly than you did yesterday. Hey teacher friends, welcome to June. If you've been with us through May, through all four weeks of waiting to excel, you already know how this works. We go slowly, one layer at a time. We name the contradiction that May puts on teachers before, you know, the way the year asks you to stay fully present, fully responsible, while all the things around you are screaming, it's over, it's over. We name the calling trap. Oh my gosh, the calling trap. That's something we're going to refer to very often in our work. The calling trap, teachers, is the belief that teachers who care a lot should sacrifice a lot. And then we talked about what release really requires of you. Not just time off, but permission. For most of you guys, the year is now over. If you are still in those final days up north, we are with you. Hold on tight, is coming. Follow this away for later because you're almost there. But for everyone else, guys, June is here. And I want you to know something right away. June is not a continuation of May. May ask you to hold on. June is something different, guys. This month we are spending four weeks inside one idea, joy on your own terms. Not the joy the profession tells you to feel. Joy that belongs to you, guys, on your terms. That is where this month is going. But before we can get there, we have to start with what is actually happening right now. Because here is what I've noticed about teachers in June, guys. A lot of you arrive at the end of the year and feel like something is kind of off. Not wrong, really, but just not quite right. Just not what you expected. You made it. This is it. This is the mega. You waited for the feeling, and then the feeling didn't come. So you push through, or you tell yourself, you just need a few more days. You chalk it up to, I'm just so tired. And you just keep moving. What you don't realize is that what you are feeling has a name. The awareness, guys. And today, that's exactly what we're gonna give it. So here's what I want you to sit with just for a minute, okay? Teachers are very good at pushing through. It is something the profession teaches you to do from the very beginning. You learn early that there is no pause button inside of a school day. There's no moment to stop and check in with yourself. Hey self, how are you doing? There's no space to process what just happened before the next thing is already in front of you. So you keep moving, you hold it together, you show up the next day, you do it again. And guys, your body learns to work with you, it holds that tension in for you. Your body keeps the energy available, it stays ready because you need it to stay ready. But this is what no one's telling you about that, guys. When the year ends, when the bell rings for the last time and the building empties out and there's nothing left to hold, your body does not just flip a switch, it does not immediately shift into rest because the calendar says June and it's summer. What it does instead is start releasing everything it's been holding since August. And that release does not feel like relief. Not at all, guys. It feels like a crash. I can tell you I know this personally. Over the last week, I've been in the building closing things out for the last time. No students, no teachers, not even no additional people anywhere, no responsibilities, no weight of all the things that we have when those, you know, the school is rocking and rolling. I came home each day and I collapsed on the couch for hours. So much so that my husband had to tell me when I woke up how long I've been laying there. And then after all of that, after I collapsed and I slept for hours, I went to the bed and I still slept. I didn't do anything fun, I didn't paint any furniture. My garage is still full of furniture. I didn't play any games with my daughter. I came home totally exhausted and could not connect it to anything. I didn't know where that came from. Teachers, have you ever experienced that? Maybe this week, uh, if you're off, just total exhaustion that your sleep could not or did not fix for you. Even having built this work, this is literally what I do for a living around this type of experience. That feeling still surprised me. You feel it as exhaustion that the steps you usually take to recover simply do not work. You feel it as a mind that keeps going even when there's nothing left to go to. You feel it, teachers, as restlessness. We're familiar with that, or flatness, or strange kind of quiet that does not feel the way you thought quiet would feel after a year like this one. Have you teachers ever heard someone say this that they got sick the first week of vacation? I mean, we waited all year for this moment and they go on vacation and get sick. Okay, teachers, I need you to know that is a real thing. Don't shrug that off. Your body can go through what is called leisure sickness. Uh-huh. Write that down. Leisure sickness. Your body is running on stress hormones all year long. Okay, so your body's essentially in this state of high alert from August through June. Okay, that's what being a teacher is a constant state of high alert. When your year ends, the body finally gets the message. Hey, something's different that it's allowed to let go. So you're in this state of high alert, August to June. The school year ends. Your body says, Uh-oh, what's up? Something's going on. I think we can let go. And it does that, but it lets go all the things all at once. And teachers, that cause you all to get sick. So that first summer exhaustion is not just exhaustion from tiredness, it is your body balancing and coming out of high alert. Teachers, the crash after school year is real. It is not a weakness, it is not ingratitude, it is not a sign that something is wrong with you. Um, it's not a sign that something's wrong with how you teach. It is your body doing exactly what it's supposed to do after 10 months of holding more than one person should have to hold. And the reason most teachers never see it coming is because no one's giving it a name. No one tells you that. No one says, teachers expect that. This is normal to your profession. You are told instead, just go home and rest. You're told instead, just to recharge. But you're not told that the transition into rest has its own season, and that season is gonna feel a little disorienting, a little heavy, nothing like what you imagined it to be. Okay, let me show you what this crash actually looks like because it does not always look like exhaustion. Okay, sometimes it looks different, sometimes it looks like a perfectly normal first week of summer. So, do you know that feeling when someone asks you what you were doing this summer? You know, that happens all the time. Hey, teacher, you're out of school. What are you doing this summer? And instead of responding, you just kind of stare at them. Not because you don't have plans. I mean, you've been in the calendar, you know what's there, but because your brain has been so locked into survival mode that the question doesn't even really compute yet. You have been operating on this school calendar for 10 months. Someone asking you about your summer feels like they are speaking a whole nother language, right? You don't even understand it. Or one of my favorites, have you been here before? Okay, you know, that first morning when you wake up, you look at your clock, and it says 9 a.m. and there's nowhere to be, right? It's one of the things you dream about. But instead of feeling free, you feel disoriented, like something is off, and you can't name it. That's the crash. That is your nervous system looking for structure. We operate, teachers, on structure. That is our jam. And your nervous system is looking for that structure, structure that has been running off all these months. Where is it? And there's nothing there, and then there's that guilt. Oh, teachers, this one is so real. You finally have a full day with nothing on your schedule, nothing to do, no one needs you. And instead of feeling relief, you kind of feel wrong. You don't say it, you dare not say it, but you just kind of feel off and wrong, you know, like that's not the way it should be. Like you should be doing something, like the open space in your day is a problem to solve instead of something you actually earned or deserved. Or maybe it shows up at home for you. The people who love you want to celebrate with you, they want the version of you that's been waiting on the sideline and waiting to come over into June with them, and you want to give them that person, but you come home from a day of doing very little, you know, shopping or whatever, and you have nothing left. You're still kind of short with people, you're still kind of flat in your conversations, you know, or if you're like me, like, oh my gosh, they're still talking. We have this thing about noise. Any teacher, you know, there's something about a lot of noise that kind of throws us off. You are physically present and emotionally somewhere else, all the way, same time. Teachers, have you experienced any of those moments? I want you to know that this is your body and your mind finishing a very long year. The crash does not care that school is over, it was always coming, it just had to wait until you were done. So, here's what I want you to understand about why the crash hits the way it does, okay? It is not just about the school year being long. We have had long years, we know how to do this. What makes the crash itself land so hard for everyone is that you were asked to carry all those things, everything for those months, and the way you were asked to kind of carry it. So I want you to think about what teaching actually requires of you. You manage the emotions of 20 to 30 people every single period, every single day. You take in their energy, you take in their problems, you take in their moods, and you take in their needs. You make hundreds, literally hundreds of small decisions before lunch. You communicate with parents, you navigate your colleagues, you meet expectations of a system that keeps adding to your plate and taking nothing off of it, and you do all of that while being expected, expected to love every minute of it because you're a teacher, and teachers love what they do, so they sacrifice it all and they do so happily. That is called the calling trap. That's the calling trap at work. The belief that teachers who care a lot should sacrifice a lot. It is the culture of the profession, it's the culture of teaching. And I want y'all to remember that. It is in the way the teachers talk to each other. You can hear the calling trap, even in conversations together. It is in the way schools are even built, physically built. The calling trap is there. And teachers, it is in you because you got into this work because you cared deeply, and that caring became permission for everyone around you, and yes, even yourself, to keep giving more. So all year long you gave more, you held more, you protected everyone else's experience of school and put your own needs at the bottom of the list. Not because you didn't matter, because a calling trap told you that's what caring looks like. That's what teachers do. You sacrifice a lot because you care a lot. And now the year is over, and the crash is here, and most teachers will push through it the same way they push through everything else. I don't doubt you'll push through this without ever stopping to look at it for what it is. But the crash is real. Teachers, what you're feeling right now is real, and the first step towards actually resting this summer is letting yourself acknowledge that. So, teachers, there's a cost to this. There's always a cost. There's a cost to the crash going unnamed. And when I say unnamed, I want you to know when these things are happening so that you can be aware. So the cost is you push through the first week of summer the same way you push through May. You tell yourself you just need a few more days. You make plans before you have recovered enough to know what you even need, you say yes to things because the calendar is open now. And it feels kind of selfish, especially especially to a teacher, you know, to say no when technically you're not working. You should say yes to all kinds of things that people are asking you. And before you know it, your summer is half over and you are still running on empty. Guys, that is the cost. That's the cost. Not one big moment, not one big thing. A slow leak. Kim, can you go pick up, you know, your sister? She's doing this. Yeah, I'm taking off. I can do it. You start filling that calendar up with all kinds of things, and you feel guilty and selfish for saying no for something that's fun that you may or may not want to do under normal circumstances. You just feel guilty for that. So the cost is this slow week, that summer that was supposed to restore you is quietly slipping by because you never stopped long enough to see what was actually happening. And then it shows up in August. You go back to school already depleted, already behind, and you wonder why. August feels so hard so fast. Teachers, the crash is not just a first week problem, it is the beginning of a pattern that determines how you carry the next school year. This time is really important. You are understanding that this is something that happens, and you're building up your awareness so you can set up not just the summer, but so you can set up the entire next school year. What you do with this right now in these first weeks matters more than you realize. You do not have to have it all figured out today, but you do have to see it. That is where this work starts, and there is so much more on the other side of that. So, this is what I want you to leave with today. I'm not asking you to fix the crash. Okay, that's not what I'm asking you to do. I am not giving you a list of things to do to recover faster or feel better by Friday. That is not what this moment needs. What I am asking you to do is something much smaller than that. And honestly, for teachers, it is sometimes the hardest thing to do. I'm just asking you to name it. Not to anyone, just to yourself. The next time you feel that flatness or that guilt or that exhaustion that doesn't make sense. I mean, you slept 18 hours, you shouldn't be exhausted, right? Instead of pushing past it, stop for just a second and say, here it is. This is the crash. This is my body finishing a year, long year, and this is real, and it makes sense. That is it, that is where the shift starts with you stopping and recognizing, calling it out this is my body finishing a very long year, this is real, and it makes sense. That is it because here is what I know after years in education You cannot protect something you have not yet acknowledged. If you don't acknowledge the thing, you can't protect yourself from the thing. And teachers spend so much time taking care of everything and everyone around them that they never stop long enough to see what is happening inside themselves. This summer, I want that to be different for you. It starts here, it starts with seeing it next week. We're gonna go a little deeper into what is keeping you from actually resting, even when you have every reason to. But for today, I want you to intentionally, please say that word with me, intentionally just let the crash be named, just let it be real, know it and see it for what it is. Teachers, you made it, and that matters, even when it doesn't feel like it yet. So this is where we start June, not with a plan, not with a challenge, just with a name for something real that most teachers carry right into the summer and just carry it with them without ever stopping to look at it. The crash is real, and now you know what it is. Next week we're gonna talk about something that shows up right behind it. The voice that tells you you should be doing something with all this open time. That voice has a name too, and we're gonna name it together. Until then, teachers, one more time you made it. Let that be enough for today. As always, we're doing this slowly, one layer at a time, together. Until next time, guys, give yourself the same care you give everyone else.