When the feeling faded before anything else did

At first I thought it was just fatigue — a tiredness that came and went with the week.

But over time it didn’t go away. Even on days that weren’t physically exhausting, the sensation was absent.

I could see the lessons I wrote, but I couldn’t feel the curiosity they once sparked in me.

When something stops feeling like itself, you notice it in the quiet spaces between moments.

What stayed while the feeling left

I still planned lessons. I still stood at the front of the room. I answered questions and managed the chaos.

But it was procedural. It was functional. It was there — but not felt.

There’s a subtle distance between doing something and *experiencing* it. That was the space I lived in.

The mechanics of the job remained, even when the meaning didn’t feel present.

You can fulfill the motions without encountering the feeling that once lived inside them.

Sometimes it reminded me of something similar — the quiet way responsibility seemed to grow until it weighed more than it once did.

How the body sensed what the mind couldn’t name

I noticed it in small things: the way my shoulders tightened when attendance sheets came around, the way I took deeper breaths before answering a question, the way I felt relieved when the classroom door closed at the end of the day.

I realized I wasn’t teaching in the way I had used to — not in a felt, engaged way — but in a way that felt like sticking to a script.

Teaching became something I *did* instead of something I *lived through.*

When the feeling of the work goes quiet, the body notices first.