What nobody is saying out loud about why summer isn't restoring you.
By Kim Lester
You made it. School is out. The last bell rang, the last parent email got sent, the last meeting ended with all notes entered, and you walked out of that building telling yourself this was it. This was finally the moment.
Eight weeks. No alarm. No lesson plans. No holding the room together while everything falls apart around you.
Eight weeks to become yourself again.
And then week one starts.
You wake up earlier than you need to. Not because you set an alarm - your body just does it. You find yourself making your summer lists. Cleaning out spaces you had no time for all year. Staying busy in a way that feels productive but is really just your nervous system not knowing what to do with itself when the pressure finally stops.
You check your phone. You tell yourself you won't. But you do.
Because there are messages. From parents who somehow still have questions. From admin asking about a student's final grades. Asking how communication with an upset parent went all year because they have a meeting coming and need the history. Asking - and you won't believe this one - have you seen Cameron's journal that his mom said you took from him when he was drawing during math.
The building is closed. The grades have been submitted. Summer school kids have been chosen. But nobody told the system that.
Teachers, the exhaustion you are carrying right now - the kind that sits in your chest and behind your eyes and in your shoulders - sleep does not cure that. Sleep helps. Sleep is necessary. But a good night of sleep does not undo ten months of taking in everything this profession asks you to take in. Ten months of being the first person children see when something is wrong at home. Ten months of being responsible for outcomes that were never fully in your control. Ten months of running past empty because the job never actually stopped asking.
You cannot sleep your way out of that in two weeks. Or eight.
Teachers... what I find hard to deal with is that no one talks about this.
We send teachers into summer with the quiet expectation that they will come back in August restored. Ready. Grateful even. As if the calendar did the work that recovery actually requires.
But your body is waiting. Still alert. Still checking. Wondering when something else is going to go wrong.
Well... that happens during week two.
And something shifts.
Teachers, the feeling you were waiting for - the lightness, the rest, the joy you promised yourself - it never came. And now you can feel August sneaking into your mind, your thoughts, even your dreams even though it is still weeks away.
But, really teachers... you never fully left.
If I can be honest with you, I have felt it myself. You do the things we do in the summer. You go to the beach. You take your kiddos to the park. You sit with friends and family at the cookout and you laugh at all the right moments. You are present in a way that even shows up on photos.
But you are not there.
You are going through the motions of a rest that your body and your mind do not know how to accept yet. Because the system trained you for ten months to stay alert, stay available, stay responsible - and it did not send a memo to your nervous system that it was safe to stop.
That is not a personal failure. That is not a mindset problem. Teachers, that is not something a better morning routine could possibly fix.
This is what chronic depletion looks like in a body that never got permission to fully stop.
Teachers, this is what I want you to remember.
Eight weeks was not built to restore what ten months took.
Say that again to yourself.
Eight weeks was not built to restore what ten months took.
And the minute you stop waiting for it to fix everything, something actually starts to feel different.
Not because summer suddenly got longer. But because you stopped waiting for a feeling that the system was never going to give you.
Teachers, you get to decide what rest looks like. Not in August. Not when you feel ready. Now. Even if rest right now just means putting the phone down for one hour and letting the message sit unanswered.
That is not laziness. That is you, finally, choosing yourself.
Give yourself the same care you give everyone else.
- Kim 🩷🌿
Teachers, your After the Bells Subscription box is waiting. It is a moment made just for teachers to support the transition from school to home. This moment is exactly what it was built for - not a reward for surviving. A reminder that you matter right now, in this moment, before August gets here.
afterthebells.org/pages/after-the-bells-subscription-box