A note from your (empty) school psychologist!
Those who think burnout isn’t real don’t live in the real world…
Let’s take a moment for some transparency- I have seasonal burnout. Yes, exactly like seasonal allergies. I suffer from burnout, but like my allergies, I have a flare-up that seems to consistently happen at certain times of the year. Like spring! I have worked in districts that call this season- testival, March Madness, etc. But there is no denying that this is a hard season in my field, and sometimes it is hard to focus on what keeps us signing our contracts. As an aside, I think it is a cruel joke of education that contracts are issued for us to sign during the *worst*, job-hating time of the year.
This is exactly what I want to focus our attention on for this newsletter. How do we navigate through burnout, and what can we do to decrease its effects on both our personal and professional lives? If you google burnout, you will be inundated with news articles about the impending mass exodus of teachers, as well as the research on the stages of burnout and how to recognize that you are, in fact, burned out. I am going to take a leap and make an assumption (and yes, I do know how dangerous that is) that you, dear reader, are likely burned out. Maybe not in your current employment, but at some level in some area. You feel it with spring sickness in your family, the frustrations of an uncertain economic future, or “fighting the good fight” for children with disabilities. Or you are better than all of us mere humans.
So I suggest something that I am not proficient at doing myself: taking a step back, calling it what it is, and making a success plan. I know it sounds like an insult at times to hear it, but recognizing that there is something happening, or not happening, is often the first step. My warning signs tend to look like this—staring at the wall, playing mindless games on my phone, and apathy. For those of you who actually know me, you would be hard-pressed to describe my personality as apathetic, disengaged, or absent. I am, sometimes unabashedly, quite the opposite and always have been. So, when I am quiet, I am either deep in thought or something more sinister, like burnout, is impacting me. But one thing I have learned over almost 35 years of being this way- someone usually notices a change before I admit it. So my advice, in addition to the activity included in the newsletter, is to have people close enough to who you are, like really, who call it out when you can’t. If you don’t have a person or two- use me. It is the Kellsye version, scientifically proven that other people usually see through the bologna when we project it before we realize it.
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