entry fifty-nine

 Monday, June 16, 2025

    It’s summer, and yet, Mondays still carry a rhythm. Not the chaos of lesson plans or forgotten field trip forms—just the quiet anchor of my four o’clock therapy appointment. Same place, same time, every week. And today was no different.

I sat on the familiar couch, soft edges worn in just the right places. And for 50 minutes, I let myself unravel.

    

    There’s something sacred about that space. No interruptions. No expectations. Just the simple, profound act of being seen and heard. As a teacher, I'm usually the one holding space for others—regulating emotions, de-escalating meltdowns, interpreting silence, translating behavior. But here, in that small, softly lit office, I don’t have to perform or protect. I just get to be. I feel my therapy sessions are helping decrease my burnout. Slowly, yes, but I feel it. Like an exhale I didn’t know I was holding. I don’t think therapy can fix everything—there’s no magic wand—but it is untangling some knots. One by one. It validating the weight I carry, the exhaustion I am swallowing, and asking the questions I’m too tired to ask out loud. It reminds me that I don’t have to bottle it all up, that my feelings deserve air, too.

    Today I talked about the end of the year. About the emptiness I felt packing up my classroom and about the uncertainty still looming. I talked about how it hurts to be needed so deeply and overlooked so often. She listened—not with pity, but with presence. That alone feels like medicine. It’s funny how healing sometimes looks like just showing up. Sitting. Speaking. Crying a little, laughing unexpectedly. I don’t leave therapy “fixed.” I leave lighter - like I’ve offloaded some of the invisible weight. In this season of summer, where the world assumes I’m resting, therapy is one of the few places I actually do.

    I don’t know what August will hold. I don’t know what the next school year will ask of me. Today, I allowed myself this—one quiet moment of honesty, of release, of simply being without fixing or performing. And in that stillness, I felt a flicker of myself returning.

One Long Weekend

No alarm tomorrow.
No lanyard, no lunchbox,
no racing the clock to punch-in on time.
Just sunlight—
uncurated and spilling across my living room floor
like it knows I’ve forgotten how to let it in.

The calendar insists it's still spring,
but to me, it murmurs softly—
summer break has arrived.
Time, at last, to exhale.
To pause.
To be.

One long weekend—
that’s how it begins.
Not with fireworks or applause,
but with breath that sinks all the way down,
and a quiet that no longer feels like defeat.

Today, I don’t need to be needed.
No emails to answer.

No data to collect.

No voices calling my name from every corner.
No behavior plans in my back pocket
like prayers I’ve rewritten too many times.

My coffee stayed hot.
My body moved slow.
I didn’t perform. I didn’t produce.
I just… was.

And that,
after a year of bending and breaking
in the name of holding everything together,
feels revolutionary.

I’m not sure what day it is.
For once,
that feels like freedom.

Let this weekend stretch—
not rushed, not measured,
but slow as honey in the sun.
Let it settle into soft recovery,
into the parts of me I’ve ignored,
into laughter that doesn’t feel borrowed.
Let it become a gentle return
to something steady,
to something whole,
to something like peace.