Teacher Explains: When You Vent Into the Void (And What It Teaches About Kids)
I said the words for the fourth time that afternoon. “I am so tired. I don’t know how I got through Period 3.” I wasn’t looking for a medal. I was just trying to get the sentence out of my mouth so I could maybe stop carrying it.
My friend Stephanie, a mom of two, put her mug down and looked at me with that specific kind of pity. “Honey,” she said, “you don’t know tired until you’ve had to negotiate a bedtime with a four-year-old. Try that for a week and come talk to me.”
I didn’t say anything. I just sort of nodded, stared at the crumbling edge of the staff room table, and drank my coffee. The thing is, I know she didn’t mean to be cruel. She was just exhausted too. But in that moment, my venting had gone straight into the void. It hadn’t just landed on deaf ears; it had landed on ears that were already so full of their own noise that mine just bounced right off.
That feeling of being dismissed—of having your specific pile of weight measured against someone else’s and found lacking—gets under your skin. I sat there feeling small and ridiculous. I’m just a teacher, I thought. I don’t have kids. I don’t get to complain. And yet, the bone-tiredness was already in my shoulders. I had to be “on” from 8:05 to 3:15, and I had just spent the last hour trying to separate two kids fighting over a pencil that neither of them actually needed.
It wasn’t the pencil. It never is. But I didn’t get the chance to explain that.
The idea of venting into the void stuck with me the rest of the week. I kept thinking about how terrible it felt to just… stop being heard. And then, on Thursday morning, I saw it happen in miniature.
Maya came up to my desk right after the morning bell. Her face was scrunched up. She was holding a broken blue crayon—the thick kind. The tip had snapped off cleanly.
“He broke my crayon,” she said, her voice wobbling.
My immediate instinct, honed over years of teaching, was to fix it. I had a box of crayons right there. I could pull out a new one, shove it in her hand, and say “Here, it’s okay, we have more.” Problem solved. Done.
But I was still smarting from my own conversation in the staff room. I didn’t want to do to her what Stephanie had done to me. So instead of handing her a fresh crayon, I looked at the broken one and simply said the first thing that came to mind: “Oh, that is so annoying.”
Maya looked up at me, surprised that I wasn’t moving.
“I really liked this one,” she said. “It was the good color.”
“Yeah, it’s a really good blue,” I said. “That stinks.”
She stood there for a second. Her shoulders did this tiny drop. She sniffed, took a deep breath, and said, “Can I have a new one, please?” I gave her the new crayon, she walked back to her seat, and that was that. No tears. No meltdown. No argument.
The crayon wasn’t the problem. The problem was that she had a feeling—a feeling of injustice, of smallness, of her world being messed with—and she needed somebody to bear witness to it before she could move on. If I had skipped the “witnessing” part and gone straight to the fix, I would have actually invalidated her. She would have felt rushed, unseen, and maybe a little foolish for being upset over a crayon. By taking the 15 seconds to acknowledge the annoyance of it, I gave her permission to feel it and then let it go.
When we vent, we aren’t looking for a solution. We’re looking for an echo. We just need someone to say, “Yeah, that stinks,” so we don’t have to carry the frustration alone. The “fix” comes easily once the feeling has been accepted. But if we offer the fix first, we’re implying that the feeling isn’t valid.
I started trying this out more completely. When a kid came to me complaining that another student “looked at them wrong,” I didn’t launch into a mediation script or tell them to ignore it. I said, “That really gets on your nerves, doesn’t it?” The kid agreed, got it off their chest, and continued with their work. Often, they didn’t even need the conflict resolved. The recognition was the resolution.
It’s a small shift, but it’s a hard one to remember in the middle of a chaotic day. My brain defaults to “problem-solve.” A student is upset? Hand them a strategy. A colleague is overwhelmed? Offer to take their recess duty. But sometimes, the most low-friction, realistic thing I can do is absolutely nothing except look them in the eye and say “That blows.”
I went back to Stephanie at coffee time the following Friday. We were in the staff room, and I was complaining about a parent email that had set my teeth on edge. I stopped myself halfway through and just put my hands on the table.
“Hey,” I said, “I know you have a toddler and a preschooler and you’re probably running on fumes. But I just want to say this out loud for a minute. I don’t need you to tell me to ignore the email. I don’t need you to say ‘kids are hard.’ I just need you to nod.”
Stephanie looked at me for a long moment. Then she sighed, and her face relaxed. “Fair enough,” she said. “That email sounds like a piece of work. I’m sorry you have to deal with that.”
It felt so much better. She didn’t have to carry my burden. She just had to acknowledge it was there.
Later, I watched her dealing with her son on the video call we had before the meeting. He was yelling about a toy. She looked exhausted. I caught her eye and mouthed, “That sounds really annoying.” She actually laughed. She mouthed a “thank you” back.
Venting into the void can feel awful, but the void isn’t the army of listeners out there. The void is just the space between your ears and someone else’s ears, and sometimes we don’t fill that space with acknowledgment—we fill it with our own reflection.
I don’t think I’ll ever fully know what Stephanie’s exhaustion feels like, just like she’ll never fully know the specific drain of managing a classroom of 28 individual humans at 1:00 PM. But I know we both need the same thing when we’re sinking: a minute of quiet, un-busy attention before the advice starts flying.
I’m getting better at giving that minute to my students. I’m getting better at asking for it from my colleagues. I don’t always get it right. Sometimes I still hand over the metaphorical new crayon too quickly, jumping to the fix before honoring the broken piece. And sometimes, when I’m really tired, I still snap at people before I remember what I’m doing.
But the next time I’m about to unload my frustrations into the ether, I’m going to try to start the sentence a little differently. I’m going to think about Maya standing at my desk with her broken blue crayon, and how much just saying the truth of the thing mattered to her. I want to be the kind of listener who holds the broken crayon for a second before throwing it away. It’s not a big fix. It’s just a little bit of real listening.
That’s about all we can do for each other some days, and it turns out, it’s usually just enough.
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