Finding Myself During a New School Year

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A photo taken on one of my weekend “me” adventures!

I’m proud to be a teacher. I love impacting lives and inspiring others to love learning just as much as I do. However, it can be dangerous to have your entire identity only in teaching and forget the other parts that compose the real you.

Teacher self-care has been a sadly humorous concept the last year or two after online learning. We found ourselves doing twice as much work with little direction and fear filling up that head space where lesson plans used to live. Living through and teaching during a pandemic found all of us exhausted, anxious, and unsure of what would happen next. 

I’m a perfectionist so I would sometimes spend hours working on the weekends even before the pandemic to make engaging “perfect” lesson plans for my students. Teaching just wasn’t my job, it was my entire way of life. My conversations with my family all centered around teaching. Money on the weekend was spent on things for my classroom and for my students. Even my wardrobe was mostly cute teacher tees. I lost my hobbies and soon forgot about my life outside of teaching. I had lost myself and felt like I was drowning in my career.  

At the end of last school year I honestly was close to quitting. I was burned out to a point where I was waking up thirty minutes before I needed to leave and would come home and just collapse in a chair, not moving for the rest of the night. My diet consisted of chocolate and high amounts of carbs with little nutrition mixed in. I was stress eating at a very unhealthy level and not doing any activities I loved. I realized over the summer that something needed to be done if I wanted to continue on in the profession that I once loved. I couldn’t continue living as a shadow of my previous self. It wasn’t fair to myself or my family and friends. 

After a refreshing summer where I refused to do any extra work for school, I found myself dreading going back to my role as a teacher. My summer was full of hiking trips, landscape photography, snuggling with my two rescue dogs, going on daily walks with my husband, going on road trips with my family, reading, writing, and crafts. I found time to do all of the things I love and really focused on bettering myself.  

So in July, I took a fearful step into the world of health coaching which is free through my school district. I’ve always been interested but I always said no each year when it was offered at my annual physical. I’m glad I challenged myself to talk to someone else about how I’m feeling. Now I’ve been setting goals with my health coach which has also inspired me to set little goals daily for all aspects of my life. 

I feel like as a teacher, I was destined to love school supplies and to do lists. And I definitely love crossing things off of those lists! I ordered a weekly calendar that has space for each day, a daily habit tracker, and a spot for weekly goals. My health coach encouraged me to make little goals in order to reach the larger, overwhelming goal. For example, one goal I had was to eat more vegetables and not stress eat all the junk food in the house when I got home from work. So I ordered five little snack boxes and spent part of my Sunday creating healthy veggie snack boxes to have everyday after school for the entire week. Crunchy baby carrots and juicy cherry tomatoes are washed and prepared and join almonds, low fat string cheese, and bell pepper strips in my daily snack box. It’s so easy to just grab and relax with a cup of decaf coffee when I first get home. 

I also wanted to work on de-stressing during the evening and not focus on all of the things that happened at work during the day. My goal of crafting daily has been truly calming on my frazzled brain. When I sit and bead bracelets, all of my problems from the day disappear as I have to focus on intricate patterns and not losing tiny glass beads. Another goal I had was to make time to read every single night before bed. When my brain is lost in the pages of someone else’s adventure, I don’t focus on what I have to do for the next day.

 Each day I keep track of what goals I accomplished that day and I don’t worry about the goals I didn’t meet that day. At the end of the week, I look at my weekly averages and use that data to set goals for myself for the upcoming week. Each week I get a little better as goals become part of my routine. I also journal at least two times a week to really gain insight into who I am and what I want out of life. It is so easy to lose ourselves in the stress of the week and listen to all of the other voices around us and tune out our own. 

So far I’ve had amazing days and days when I feel like I’m losing myself like last year to the stresses of this career. However, I know that I don’t give up and keep making small changes, I will remember to make myself more important each day. I’m a proud middle school teacher, but also a wife, a dog mom, a daughter, a sister, and a friend. My students deserve to have the best version of me teaching them, not the stressed out version I didn’t recognize at the end of last year. What would help you destress after a long day? What goals for your life are you striving to reach?

* All photos were taken by me on the hikes and adventures my family and I have been enjoying since the start of school.

Lisa Barnard

Lisa Barnard is a 6th-grade science teacher in the city of Flagstaff. She has experience in both elementary and middle school settings. This will be her 11th year of teaching and she loves inspiring a joy of learning in her students. She also mentors university students who are interested in becoming teachers. After earning her bachelor's degree in Elementary Education from Northern Arizona University, she went on to also get her masters in Elementary Education with a Reading Specialist Endorsement. In her free time, she enjoys landscape photography, reading, collecting fossils, writing, and hiking around Arizona with her husband Nick and their two dogs.