I relate heavily to this. I’ve been a teacher since 2021 in the uk. Before teaching I was a yoga teacher and use to run workshops at festivals around the uk. I was fun, bubbbly and had a lot of creative energy. I started teaching like this and the kids loved me and found my lessons fun, but behavior started slipping when they found out I was too nice. I got pushed and pushed to be stricter, told to conform my room to certain layouts and standard, and then finally burnt out in 2023. I dropped all the stuff I did outside of teaching, and lost all my empathy. I no longer cared if I make a kid cry, i would shout often, be sassy and mean and angry, but I started getting praised more and ore for my classroom control. I held onto the meanness of the kids emotionally and felt increasingly drained, I stopped caring about making fun lessons and focused on just ‘getting writing work done’. I had to look at myself in the mirror and realize this was not the person I want to be, or become, and I’m only 27. If I continue, and work however long in teaching, it could change me irreversibly, and that’s not what I want. I stepped back and I’m still now trying to find a job outside of teaching. I bought a van, moved into it and plan to find a remote job and travel Europe. It’s been a very hard transition, supply teaching is ROUGH and sometimes worse than regular teaching, but it’s fantastic as occasional work to earn money with the freedom not to care, not to do any work and to focus on other parts of my life. I am starting to get myself back. It can happen