November 2026 Vlog: Gratitude in the Grind

GRATITUDE, THE GRIND, AND THE HOLIDAY SEASON

By Chance Copeland

I have no concept of time. This is something I discovered several years ago, by accident, in a conversation with my wife about something I’d thought happened a couple of weeks before. She looked at me like I’d grown a horn on my head, raised an eyebrow, and replied simply, “that was four months ago.” I’d shrugged, and in that moment, my fate was sealed as the person in our family who has no sense of when things happened, when they will happen, or even how long five minutes feels.

I say all of that to say this: the holidays snuck up on me this year, and it was approximately three weeks ago (okay, it could have been five weeks or two months ago) that my wife also reminded me our wish lists for the holidays were “due” to our family on November 1st. Today, several weeks later, I have exactly one thing on my list: a blinking cursor. Because I tend to view nothing as a unique experience, I’m willing to guess that those reading this have something (or several somethings) on their lists as well as we approach the holidays: things to do around the house, things to finish up at work, gifts to buy for loved ones, plans to make for celebrations. For me, the days blur together, are somehow unbelievably short and insanely long all at once, and usually end with a longer list of “to-do’s” than they began with. Then, when we add to these lists the pressures we face at work, in our personal lives, and in awkward dinner-table conversation at family holiday dinners, it comes as no surprise that many of us feel more like Ebenezer Scrooge than Santa Claus. Life is a grind, even when everything goes well. But when it doesn’t go well, that grind can sometimes feel like a nightmare it’s hard to wake up from. So, how do we wake up? How do we honor the hard moments, validate our exhaustion, get our work done, and still show up for the family dinner? The answer is so simple it seems ridiculous: gratitude.

Burning Out and Finding Balance

By Chance Copeland

I sat down to write this blog post nine days ago.  I typed out the title, erased it, adjusted the font, typed it out again, decided to try a different one, and erased that one too. When I decided that the worn-out cushion of my office chair must be the reason that I couldn’t think of anything to say, I raised the standing desk, jumped on my walking pad, and started moving. Then, the phone rang. I shut the computer, reassured myself that I would come back to it just as soon as I finished solving the problem that came up in its place, and then I forgot about it until nine days later, when my internal panic about unfulfilled promises started feeling like an emergency whose origins I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Panic led to memory, and memory led to this moment: back on my walking pad, the very opposite of mindful and probably well-past expert status in nothing except my own burnout.

If you’re reading this as an administrator working in special education, a teacher, a student, or even somebody who clicked the wrong link online and ended up here by mistake, I don’t think it is much of an assumption to make that you are either currently overwhelmed by life’s competing demands, have been in the past, or will be sometime in the future (I’m not a fortune-teller, just a realist). If unchecked, what starts as a relatively simple human experience can lead to a debilitating burnout, which is what happened for me. About three weeks ago, I got home from a 14-hour day seeing clients, taking classes, and using 15-minute walk breaks to check on clients at my other job over the phone, and I told my wife, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m quitting.” And quit I did.