On Burnout, Identity, and the Courage to Start Again

Stephen
4 days ago
5 min read

What leaving teaching - and returning to myself - taught me about second acts.

Tom Stoppard has been on my mind since the weekend. It isn’t so much his passing that struck me, but the way his plays have accompanied different stages of my life. As an English student and later an English teacher, his writing helped shape how I saw language, meaning, and the roles we all find ourselves cast into.

Picking up those old copies now feels like opening a notebook from another life - finding pieces of myself in the margins.

It’s had me reflecting on something deeper: how a single writer can shape your worldview, and how a life can change direction while still carrying the same thread. These reflections arrived at a moment when I’ve also been thinking a lot about burnout, identity, purpose, and what it means to outgrow a career that once defined you.

How Tom Stoppard Shaped My parts of my Life

For me, Stoppard was one of those rare writers who made me fall in love with complexity - the idea that a play could be hilarious and heartbreaking, chaotic and profound. I still remember watching Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth in the gardens of Pembroke College and feeling something open in me. Language wasn’t just a tool; it was a world you could step into or out of.

As a teacher, his plays became part of the rhythm of my working life.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was a text I picked with relish whenever it appeared on the A level syllabus. Two minor characters stranded in someone else’s story, trying to make sense of a script they didn't write. It was a perfect text for Sixth Formers trying to work out where they fitted in the world.

When we staged The Real Inspector Hound as the first Senior Play during my time as a Housemaster, I watched a group of teenagers learn the strange magic of performance - how absurdity, earnestness, and self-discovery can collide on a school stage.

Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth reminded me, again and again, that language is never neutral. It shapes who we’re allowed to be. That message stayed with me far beyond the classroom.

A Conversation That Brought It All Back

Last week, I met an ex-pupil in London. He’d been in that first Senior Play and studied English at university after five years in my classroom. Now he works in finance.

We talked about the texts we’d studied, the boys who struggled, the one who’s now a playwright, and the parts of teaching that have stayed with us both. Then he asked me a question that caught me off guard: “Do you miss teaching?”

The truth:. I miss teaching Literature - the energy of a group discovering themselves in a text they’d dismissed as “old and confusing.”

But what I really miss is the pastoral side: the unexpected corridor conversations, the privilege of walking alongside young people as they work out who they are becoming.

That part of the job never left. It simply changed form.

Burnout, Identity Loss, and Leaving a Career That Defined Me

I left teaching a decade ago after burning out. At the time, it felt like stepping off stage mid-performance with no idea whether another act existed.

Teaching wasn’t just something I did. It was who I was.

Head of English. Housemaster. ‘Sir.’

The one scribbling Stoppard on the whiteboard and going off on tangents about Chaucer Blake and Webster.

When I stepped away, the structure that held my identity together disappeared. With it came the deeper truth I’d been able to avoid while staying busy, needed, and useful.

In the years that followed, I burned out more than once. I had to finally face the trauma I’d been outrunning. I realised that the very traits that made me a 'good teacher' - over-responsibility, perfectionism, carrying too much - came at a steep cost in my personal life.

This is where burnout and identity meet. Burnout isn’t simply exhaustion. It’s losing the version of yourself that once made sense.

From the Classroom to the Therapy Room

Becoming a therapist wasn’t a clean pivot. It was messy, uncomfortable, and human. It required me to admit that I wasn’t just someone who helped others with their struggles - I had to face my own.

Yet looking back, the thread feels obvious.

Stoppard’s characters often question who wrote the script of their lives. They wrestle with language, roles, and identity. In their own way, both my pupils and my clients have done the same.

The work has changed, the setting has changed, but the heart of it hasn’t:

One human being walking alongside another.
Making space for honest questions.
Holding a story with care until the person telling it can bear to hold it themselves.

When I walked away from teaching, I didn’t realise that this was what I’d eventually rebuild.

Grief, Gratitude, and the Quiet Courage to Begin Again

Reading about Stoppard’s death stirred up a strange mix of emotions.

Grief for the writer who shaped my younger self.
Grief for the version of me who thought teaching would be the final act of my working life.
But also, unexpectedly, gratitude.

Gratitude that life isn’t a fixed script. That burnout, painful as it is, can be a turning point.

That losing an identity can be the beginning of a new one.

When my ex-pupil asked if I missed teaching, what I really heard was:

‘Do you miss that version of yourself?’

Stopping on a bridge over water to reflect on burnout and loss and a change in career — Photo by Gilly Photography

Some days, yes. I miss the energy of a lively lesson, the camaraderie of colleagues who understood the exhaustion of the Michaelmas term.

But I don’t miss the way I drove myself or the parts of my story I had to suppress to keep going.

Now, when I walk with a client beside a river or sit with them online as they piece together their history, the feeling is familiar. Something shifts. Someone sees themselves more clearly.

That, for me, is the real thread that connects teaching, therapy, and everything in between:

the belief that words, relationships, and shared spaces help us live more honestly.

Stepping Into Your Own Second Act

When I look back, it isn’t the famous productions of Stoppard that stay with me. It’s the school plays, the Sixth Form debates, the moments when young people dared to tell the truth about themselves.

Those moments shaped me as much as they shaped them.

Perhaps that’s why his work feels so intertwined with this reflection on burnout and identity.

Because all of us, in our own ways, are trying to step from one act of life into another without losing the thread of who we are.

If you’re grieving a career you’ve left, navigating burnout, or trying to rebuild an identity that feels more honest and grounded, you’re not on your own.