The Day I Almost Quit

Issue #8

The Day I Almost Quit

It was a Sunday night in February.

Not the dramatic kind of breaking point you read about in memoirs. No single catastrophic event. No screaming match. No moment you could point to and say — that’s the one that did it. Just a Sunday night, sitting at the kitchen table with a stack of unread emails, a discipline report I hadn’t finished, a parent callback I’d been avoiding since Thursday, and a feeling I couldn’t name that had been sitting on my chest for about six weeks.

My wife walked in, looked at me, and said quietly: “You haven’t laughed in a month.”

I didn’t argue with her. Because she was right. And because somewhere underneath the exhaustion I already knew what I hadn’t been willing to say out loud.

I was burning out. And I had been so busy performing competence that I hadn’t told a single person.

Burnout in school leadership is uniquely dangerous because the job selects for people who push through. Every principal, every CEO, every leader who rises to t…