Leaving Teaching, Leaving Home: A Five-Part Series
When the Systems in Your Life Break Down, So Do You
This series isn’t just about leaving a job—it’s about stepping away from an entire framework of life. Teaching in NYC during COVID took an already broken system and made it absurd, but burnout had started long before that. These five stories trace the slow unraveling, the moments I knew I had to leave, and what came next.
At the time, nothing felt clear. We had always imagined moving abroad as something we’d do later. Teaching was supposed to be a lifelong career. But when the cracks started forming, it became impossible to ignore them. Eventually, leaving felt like the only real choice.
the journey begins at home
I have been meaning to put this series in one places for a while and, as I have been recovering, it seemed like a good time to get to it. I’ve also wanted to write more about my teaching life and then leaving the U.S., so consider this a start.
If you’re interested in more about this part of my life, let me know. It’s not really about France, per se, but I think there’s something interesting about how others arrived at the choices they’ve made. And I have so many notes on my experiences teaching, it could be a whole other substack, like Unread Notes From My Former Life or something like that. Or I could call it Self: Taught or something more arty. I dunno.
This series is a look at what it really meant for me to walk away—not just from a job, but from an entire framework of life.
It’s a complicated - when I look back, it all makes sense to me how it happened, but I think that’s just the way I’ve chosen to put my memories of it together.
That happens. I have fit it into this kind of narrative order, but things were not so simple at the time.
Teaching was something I thought I would do for years.
Our home was somewhere we never planned on leaving, yet there was also some idea that we had about living in another country - but we put that aside for a while.
But something shifted, broke a little - and once it cracked, it was like a fine china bowl that sounds dull whenever you picked it up, Those breaks go deeper than you see and it’s more delicate as you handle it and you know it will just snap into pieces one day.
Once the cracks showed, the breaking things were all I think about.
When My Teaching Career Finally Broke: Stories of Burnout and Leaving
Teaching in NYC—especially during COVID—wasn’t just exhausting. Even in the best of times, the system made real teaching feel like an act of rebellion. You had to sneak it in between data meetings, test prep, and whatever new initiative had just been rolled out by someone who hadn’t been in a classroom in a decade.
But the burnout didn’t start with the pandemic. That was just the accelerant.
The fire had been smoldering for years—impossible expectations, scripted curriculum, sorta - most admins didn’t know what the hell they wanted, under fire from so many directions themselves, the creeping sense that none of it actually helped kids.
I remember sitting in one meeting, looking around the room, and thinking, Are we all just pretending this works?
But god help you if you’re the one who’s not pretending along.
Eventually, I hit a wall. It wasn’t a dramatic crash, more like erosion. One day I realized: staying felt more impossible than leaving.
This is a look at what it meant to walk away—not just from a job, but from a whole imagined future. The plans we made, the time we spent trying to make it work, the version of life we thought we were building—we let it all go.
“We’re really doing this?” my wife asked one night, quiet but serious.
I nodded. “Yeah. We’re fucking done.”
it wasn’t exactly like that, but the moment it changed was a bit like that.
So we pulled up stakes and left. Not just our jobs. Our apartment, our routines, our whole sense of what came next.
And then came the silence. The space where a life used to be. We had to figure out and to build what came after—slowly, awkwardly, and without a map.
1. Breaking Point: From Teacher Burnout to a New Life Abroad (Aug 21, 2024)
The exact moment I knew I was done—not just tired, not just frustrated, but fully, completely done. A conversation with my principal over yet another spreadsheet of meaningless data was the final straw. It was almost the exact same conversation I’d had with 3 other principals before.
Finding Home Elsewhere
2. Frayed at the Edges (Aug 28, 2024)
I just recorded new audio!
Burnout doesn’t happen overnight. It builds—through bureaucracy, impossible expectations, and the creeping realization that none of it actually helps kids. Or me. Here’s how it unraveled for me.
Finding Home Elsewhere
3. Leaving Education: Letting Go of the Grind (Sep 4, 2024)
Months after I left, I got an email from my old principal reminding staff to “make sure our data was in order.” It was the perfect, unintentional confirmation that walking away had been the right decision.
Finding Home Elsewhere
4. From Blackboard to Barnyard (Sep 11, 2024)
A teaching grant took me to a small farm in France, where two former city dwellers who had left it all behind showed me a completely different way of working, living, and thinking about time. The experience planted the first seed of what would eventually become my life abroad.
Finding Home Elsewhere
5. Why Moving to France Changed Our Lives (Sep 18, 2024)
Moving abroad didn’t fix burnout overnight, but it gave me something I hadn’t had in years—space. Space to rethink everything I had taken for granted. Years later, the stresses are different, the pace is different, and for the first time in a long time, I feel like we’re making our own decisions, even if they’re not quite perfect.
This isn’t just about quitting a job. It’s about stepping outside a place and a system and realizing how much of yourself and your thinking was shaped by it. teaching is a funny job like that. It really can be an identity as well as a job. It was for me.
Finding Home Elsewhere
If you’re enjoying this and want to support it, feel free to share, comment, or just send good vibes.
And if you’re feeling extra generous, you can buy me a coffee while I attempt to regain depth perception. Consider it a small contribution to the “Keith Figures Out Just Where Doorways Are” initiative.
Progress is… ongoing.
K
