What happens when a teacher loses herself so slowly that nobody notices. Including her.
By Kim Lester
She is fine.
That is what she says when someone asks. That is what she has been saying for longer than she can remember.
Fine at the staff meeting. Fine at the dinner table. Fine in the classroom. Fine in the mirror on the mornings she can bring herself to look.
And nobody questions it. Because she shows up. She plans. She grades. She attends the meetings. She does everything a fine person does.
But teachers. She is not fine.
She has not been fine for a while.
And the cost of pretending otherwise is something the system will never put in a report.
Because here is what has been quietly happening in that classroom.
She has been screamed at. Cursed at. Hit with words that should have ended with a consequence and instead ended with a meeting where she was told to build a better relationship.
She has been hit. Kicked. Bitten. Scratched. Shoved.
She has watched things get thrown across her classroom. Watched a room she built get destroyed. Watched students walk away from what they did without a word from anyone in charge.
And every single time that happened and nothing changed, she lost a piece of herself she has not gotten back.
Not dramatically. Quietly.
The way something leaves when you stop believing it was ever really yours to keep.
She remembers when the joy was there.
She can still name the exact moment it started to go. She has never said it out loud to anyone. But she knows. The way you know something has shifted before you can explain how or why.
She used to love this.
Not in a greeting card way. In a real way. In a she chose this on purpose way. She believed she would change the world through children. She believed in the future she was helping build. She believed that teaching was how she would leave her mark.
And she was right. It was. It still could be.
But the weight of being asked to absorb things no professional should absorb alone got in the way. Without support. Without protection. Without someone standing in her corner saying that is not okay and we are going to do something about it.
So she does what she has always done.
She pushes it down. She goes through the motions with her students. Her team. Her family. Worst of all with herself.
She stays busy. Because busy means she does not have to sit with what is sitting in her chest.
She is fine.
She cannot let them down. The kids need her. Her team. The parents. The admin. Her family. Everyone in her life has built something on the foundation of her being okay. And she will not be the one to let that foundation crack.
So she performs whole.
Every day.
She performs whole.
And her sadness hides in plain sight. The people who love her can feel something. They cannot name it because she will not let them name it. She redirects. She changes the subject. She makes a joke. She finds something to do.
Because if she lets someone name it she will have to look at it.
And she is not ready for that.
She is not sure she will ever be ready for that.
Teachers. I want to say something that the system has never said to her.
What is happening to her is not a personal failure.
It is not evidence that she was never cut out for this.
It is not proof that she should have picked a different career.
It is what happens when a person keeps giving to a system that was never designed to give anything back.
When a person absorbs what should have had consequences.
When a person performs whole for so long that she forgets what whole actually felt like.
She did not lose herself because she was not strong enough.
She lost herself because she was too strong for too long with too little support.
And that is not the same thing.
Getting back to yourself does not start with a grand gesture.
It starts with one honest moment.
Where you stop saying fine.
And start telling the truth about what this has cost you.
Because you cannot pour from a place this depleted.
But you can begin.
Not by pretending the weight was never there.
By finally putting it down long enough to remember who you were before you picked it up.
Teachers, before you know how to protect yourself, you have to know where you are. Use our free stage finder to find out.
https://afterthebells.org/pages/find-my-stage
— Kim 🩷🌿
The After the Bells box was not built to fix what the system broke. It was built to remind her that someone sees her, believes her, and built something just for her.