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.