Being Committed without Being Consumed

Black educators don't have to lose ourselves to show we care.

From Letters from the Lab

There’s a particular kind of quiet that can arrive after a Black educator leaves a school.

Not peace, exactly. Not at first.

The calendar changes first. Your life no longer moves by semesters, testing windows, IEP meetings, 504 plans, professional development days, and school breaks. The language shifts too. Acronyms, initiatives, district shorthand, school-specific codes, all the words that once organized your day, begin to lose their place.

Then comes the harder realization.

Many of your friends may still be inside the system. Their lives still move according to school rhythms. Their vacations, stress, deadlines, and exhaustion are still tied to the academic calendar. Meanwhile, you are standing somewhere else, trying to understand who you are

Who am I when I’m no longer needed in the same way?

In my conversation with Dr. Jamita Horton on The Exit Interview, she named something I’ve heard across so many stories from Black educators who’ve left traditional school spaces. After years of being “Ms. Horton,” after teaching, leading, supporting students, coaching teachers, and giving so much of herself to school communities, leaving became more than a career transition. It became a process of finding herself.

That stayed with me because it wasn’t unusual.

Across nearly 90 episodes of The Exit Interview, Black educators have described this same reckoning in different ways. Education became their language, community, schedule, identity, and sometimes their entire sense of purpose. Years were spent buying supplies for students, making sure colleagues were okay, showing up early, staying late, attending school events, answering messages, grading papers, sponsoring clubs, running committees, planning Black History Month programs, and being “the one” everyone could count on.

After leaving, many had to learn how to exist without the school building defining them.

That’s one of the things we don’t talk enough about: Black educator burnout. It’s not only exhaustion. It’s not only stress. It’s not only the need for a different job.

Sometimes, we’re recovering from becoming the job.

Education makes that easy. School systems are built on overextension. Urgency, delayed care, skipped meals, unpaid labor, and the idea that a “good” teacher gives beyond what’s reasonable are treated as normal. Once you’re fully bought in, it becomes easier to forget about equal pay, rest, physical health, mental health, bathroom breaks, lunch, medical appointments, and the kind of life other professionals are allowed to have without needing to justify it.

Black educators carry another layer inside that culture.

Many of us know the pride and pressure of representation. We understand what it means for Black children to see someone who looks like them in a classroom, hallway, counseling office, front office, or leadership seat. Some of us remember being the child who needed a Black teacher. Our presence can matter deeply, especially in schools where Black students rarely feel fully seen, believed, protected, or affirmed.

So the giving begins.

It starts with care for the children. Then it stretches toward families, colleagues, community, culture, advocacy, and survival. We know schools are steeped in White supremacy, and for some students, our classrooms may be one of the few soft places they encounter all day.

That care is real.

But truth can still be used to extract too much from us.

Schools often praise Black educators for the very things that harm us over time: staying late, arriving early, never taking off, buying supplies, bringing food for students, answering family messages at all hours, leading the Black Student Alliance, planning the Black History Month assembly, facilitating affinity spaces, sitting on DEI committees, mentoring every Black child in the building, and carrying work nobody else wants to hold.

The praise sounds warm.

“Thank you so much for taking this on.”

“We knew you’d be the perfect person.”

“The kids need you.”

“Nobody does it like you.”

“We appreciate your dedication.”

Yet praise isn’t always care.

Sometimes praise is a trade. The system gives affirmation, and in return it receives access to our evenings, weekends, money, bodies, racial identity, emotional labor, creativity, and sense of responsibility. It tells us we’re exceptional, then uses that exceptionality to justify asking more from us than it would ever ask from others.

That’s where commitment begins to blur into self-abandonment.

From the outside, they can look the same. Staying late may appear to be dedication. Showing up for every student event may seem like love. Saying yes when something needs to be done may look like leadership. Being dependable can be celebrated as excellence.

But commitment and self-abandonment are not the same.

Commitment has boundaries.

Self-abandonment does not.

A committed educator can say, “I care about children, and I also care about myself.” An educator caught in self-abandonment learns to prove care by ignoring the body, delaying the appointment, skipping the meal, answering every message, and saying yes long after the spirit has already said no.

Schools need to stop calling self-abandonment commitment.

Staying late every day isn’t automatically commitment. Taking papers home every night isn’t automatically commitment. Skipping lunch, pushing off breast exams, delaying hip surgeries, missing therapy appointments, giving up rest, losing family time, and running unpaid committees are not signs of devotion.

They are signs that something is wrong.

The harm deepens when the work placed on Black educators is work the school would never ask White counterparts to carry in the same way.

Dr. Horton’s story holds this tension with painful clarity. Early in her career, while teaching in Milwaukee, she challenged the coded ways adults were talking about Black students. Instead of being supported for naming harm, she was told she cared too much.

That phrase stayed with me.

“You care too much” sounds like a comment about emotion, but in schools it can become a disciplinary tool. It tells Black educators that our care is acceptable when it produces labor, compliance, and sacrifice, but unacceptable when it challenges how Black children are being spoken about, controlled, or harmed.

Care gets praised when it keeps the system running. The same care gets punished when it interrupts the system’s violence.

Later, when Dr. Horton moved into leadership, she found herself caught between what teachers and students needed and what the larger network demanded. She was trying to support teachers, respond to students, hold relationships, and protect people inside a system that kept returning to micromanagement, urgency, enforcement, and data-driven pressure after the pandemic.

Her reflection on COVID should stop us. She said that, minus the life-threatening pandemic, that period was the most sustained she had ever felt as a teacher. Protected planning time existed. Lunch was protected. Meetings were fewer. The pace was calmer. There was more room to breathe.

If some educators felt more sustained during a global crisis than they felt during “normal” school operations, then normal was never humane.

Schools learned that protected time was possible. They learned that fewer meetings were possible. Teachers could plan, breathe, build relationships, and move differently when their time wasn’t constantly consumed. Many systems still rushed right back to what they already knew was harming people.

That return was not accidental.

It was a choice.

When schools say they care about Black educator retention, they need to be honest about what they are trying to retain. Are they trying to retain Black educators as whole human beings, or are they trying to retain our labor, racial identity, cultural knowledge, relationships with students, willingness to absorb harm, and ability to make institutions look more diverse than they actually feel?

Wanting Black educators to stay well is different from wanting Black educators to stay employed.

A school that truly wanted Black educators to stay well would pay attention to our plates before we collapse under the weight of them. It would not simply say, “Great job taking all this on.” It would ask, “What needs to come off?” Leaders would notice when the same Black educator is running the adult affinity group, mentoring students, leading Black History Month, joining the equity committee, serving as the unofficial family liaison, and still doing their actual job.

At some point, intervention becomes necessary.

Not appreciation.

Protection.

A leader committed to Black educator wellness might have to say, “No, you can’t take on one more thing. We’re committed to your mental, physical, and spiritual health. We’ll resource this another way.”

That kind of leadership requires courage because schools are often relieved when Black educators pick up what the institution has failed to build. Our yes becomes their solution. Our overwork becomes their diversity plan. Our sacrifice becomes their evidence of care.

This is not only about White leaders.

White supremacy doesn’t only operate through White people. It moves through systems, hierarchy, urgency, perfectionism, scarcity, fear, and survival logic. Black leaders and leaders of Color can reproduce these patterns too. After surviving the same systems, we can become fluent in their demands. We can know exactly what is happening to Black educators and still ask them to push through because the school needs it, the district expects it, or the students are counting on them.

To Black leaders, I want to say this with care and honesty: you need wellness too.

Boundaries matter for you as well. So do spaces where you can be honest about what leadership is costing you without fear of retaliation. At the same time, you know when your people are being used up. You know what it looks like when someone is saying yes from pressure instead of purpose. You know what it means to be harmed in the name of the system.

See them.

Protect them.

Interrupt the cycle.

We do not all need to be “in this together” if “this” means suffering for the children.

That language has trapped too many of us.

“For the kids” can be beautiful. It can also be dangerous. For Black educators, it often carries history, memory, love, and guilt. Many of us are trying to create classrooms rooted in the kind of communal care we’ve heard about from Black educators who came before us. We’re trying to make sure children feel loved, protected, challenged, and seen. We’re trying to offer ancestral levels of care inside institutions that are not structured to care for us back.

That’s the tension.

Our babies deserve to be good. They deserve educators who root for them, honor their families, and believe in their futures. None of that should require Black educators to abandon the adults we are still becoming.

Guilt becomes especially powerful when everyone around you is also sacrificing. In a culture where people arrive early, stay late, skip lunch, answer emails at night, and take on unpaid work, boundaries can start to look like betrayal. Choosing yourself may unsettle people because it forces them to see where they may still be abandoning themselves.

That guilt does not always end when you leave.

Some people may resent your decision to choose yourself. They may feel abandoned, left behind, or judged by your exit. That can create a loneliness people don’t always talk about.

Still, your self-abandonment won't make the system change its ways.

No matter how much you give, the system will keep asking for more unless someone interrupts the cycle. Awards, thank-you notes, gift cards, praise, and public recognition can’t compensate for depletion, isolation, and the slow loss of self.

That’s why we need to talk about human development, not just professional development.

Black educators don’t only need another training on instruction, data, curriculum, compliance, or classroom management. We need spaces to name harm, build language for what happened, understand racial battle fatigue, examine boundaries, heal without surveillance, and decide who we are beyond the school’s needs.

Those spaces cannot be controlled by the same institutions causing the harm.

Districts can fund them. Schools can resource them. Leaders can honor them. Black educators still need wellness and healing spaces where they can speak freely, process honestly, and ask hard questions without fear that their truth will be used against them.

Questions like these deserve room:

Do I want to stay in the classroom?

Would leadership sustain me or consume me?

Is it time to leave this institution?

Can I remain in education, but differently?

Who am I outside of the role?

That last question matters because leaving a school system is not the same as leaving education.

Most of the Black educators I’ve interviewed have not left education. They’ve left institutions. They’ve become consultants, nonprofit leaders, policy advocates, foundation staff, curriculum designers, wellness practitioners, researchers, organizers, tutors, mentors, and community builders. They support families navigating IEPs. They help neighbors understand school systems. They raise their own children with deep educational knowledge. The teaching continues, even when it no longer happens inside a classroom.

We don’t necessarily leave education. We change the space where our education lives.

For some of us, leaving is not about becoming ourselves again. We entered classrooms so young that we are not returning to some untouched former self. We are meeting ourselves for the first time outside of institutional urgency.

I started teaching at 23. I left traditional school spaces in my late 30s. Much of my adult formation happened inside education systems. For a long time, even after I left the classroom, I still felt like a traditional classroom teacher. I carried the language, the pace, the urgency, and the need to explain myself through what I used to do.

Distance eventually taught me something.

I didn’t miss being consumed.

There was no need to lead with “I used to teach” in every space. Keeping up with every new education debate, teaching trend, classroom conversation, or district policy shift no longer felt required. I could learn about other things. Travel. Rest. Wonder. Build Liberated Educators Lab from a place of purpose without letting it swallow me whole.

I still consider myself an educator.

But I no longer believe an institution gets to decide the boundaries of that identity.

That is the lesson Dr. Horton named so clearly in our conversation:

“Leaving was really a process of finding myself. And I also learned the lesson that I will never give my entire identity to an entity or an organization ever again… I can believe in the mission of an organization, I can believe in the vision of the organization and do everything to make sure that I’m supporting students and teachers. I cannot let my entire identity be wrapped up into that, because I’ve done that twice. I don’t want to lose myself again.”

That is the heart of it.

Believing in the mission does not require becoming the institution. Loving children does not require losing ourselves. Supporting teachers does not require sacrificing our bodies. Serving communities does not mean abandoning our own.

To former Black educators, I want you to know: you’re not crazy. Leaving can feel like grief, silence, relief, guilt, bitterness, freedom, and confusion all at once. Rebuilding community from scratch can be hard. Looking around and realizing your friends, language, hobbies, routines, and sense of worth were all tied to school can be painful.

There is nothing wrong with you.

That is what the system trained you to build.

I’m proud of you for choosing yourself. My hope is that you find community outside of the school building that loves you and sees you. May you build a life that doesn’t require usefulness as the price of belonging. Healing can take a long time, but it is more than possible.

To current Black educators, I want you to hear me clearly: choosing yourself does not have to wait until the end of the school year. Summer break does not have to be the first moment you breathe. Retirement does not have to be the first time you rest. A medical crisis should not be the thing that finally gives you permission to stop.

Start now.

Take the appointment. Say no to the unpaid committee. Stop volunteering for labor that drains you. Build friendships outside of school. Remember your hobbies. Define education for yourself. Love the children and still become who you want to be inside and outside of the school system.

You can be there for them more fully when you are also there for yourself.

Refuse to let the system swallow you whole.

Release the guilt that says constant availability is the only proof of care. Let go of the shame that tells you choosing yourself means abandoning the children. Stop believing the lie that exhaustion is evidence of love.

Yes, do it for the kids.

But do it for the child inside yourself, too.

The one who still needs rest. The one who still needs joy. The one who still needs protection. The one who still deserves a life beyond being useful.

Black educators can love children and still choose themselves. We can believe in the mission without giving our entire identity to the institution. We can be committed without being consumed.

Commitment has boundaries.

Self-abandonment does not.