Log Girl Summer
On burnout, being consumed, and superblooms
Dear readers,
This began as a love letter to educators at the end of an academic year, but perhaps I am writing it to all of us who are feeling burnt out, depleted, and consumed by the systems we work and live within. I am mostly speaking here to formal education systems, particularly higher ed. Even if you don’t work in education, maybe you’ll feel parts of yourself here in modern life.
Wishing better for all of us,
Stephanie
P.S. shout-out to the seasonal ritual crew who co-created the conditions for Log Girl Summer to emerge from my mouth ;)
Today’s solstice marks the start of summer in the northern hemisphere - which is where I am, though it is the beginning of the rainy season here in Costa Rica so is not exactly summer. However…
This season, I am calling in:
Log Girl Summer.
Not hot girl. Not fit girl. Not boss girl.
Log girl.
The end of this academic year has me feeling like a burnt log, still smoldering. I have been ravaged by a forest fire. I am charred, ashen, still hot, and if the right breeze comes along (i.e., another request/demand), I might burst back into flames at any moment, at risk of scorching everything on my path.
I know I need time to cool down, to rest, be still, to become good soil1 and regenerate. And I know in my bones that after a fire, during the recovery, the most beautiful blooms are possible. I want to dissolve into ash on the forest floor so that something more beautiful can germinate.
I hold the vision that, once given a chance to cool and rest and bask and dwell in the rain, a superbloom of wildflowers will blossom all around me and on me. I hold the vision that I will be reborn, giving the forest life, nourishing its soil, and from this nourishment, life can grow anew.
I write to you from the sheer exhaustion that comes at the end of an academic year. I cannot say I am quite on the other side of it, but I am coming up. Switching metaphors for a moment from forest to ocean: like a deep-sea diver slowly on the way to the surface, I am still making my way up from the depths of nearly drowning. But it is from this place that I want to write to you, from not quite having recovered. From not quite having made it back, and not even sure if I want to (to the surface, absolutely; to the depths? uncertain). I need to write to you from these depths.
I wonder how many of my educator friends feel this way at the end of the year, too (I know many do). Nothing left. Burnt. Dragged. Pummelled. Classes stop (side note: they haven’t), and then…the admin work. The admin work that has piled up because you couldn’t tend to it while teaching. The whack-a-mole of requests that, in themselves, seem so small, but each one creates a mountain that you can’t get out from under. Everyone thinks you're “off” because you’re not teaching, not realizing there is so much more to the job than classroom hours. Paraphrasing words from my teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, teaching is made up of many non-teaching elements.
As I rise towards the surface, somehow more water is above me - another letter, another application, another chapter, another journal review. As I rise towards the surface, somehow it drifts further away still.
How can one feel burning and drowning at the same time?
Almost everyone I know feels burnt out - but burnout doesn’t feel like the right word. Burnout makes it sound like a personal failure. Like we let it happen. Like we could have taken better care of ourselves. Like we shouldn’t have taken on so much, when that is simply not allowed. Take it or leave, those are your choices.
It’s as if in a forest fire, each tree is personally responsible for getting burned.
We cannot meditate our way out of toxic, broken systems.
We cannot self-care our way out of systemic harm and toxicity.
There are not enough massages or therapy or mani-pedis in the world to recover.
I want better for us - so much better for us. I want to finish a year and feel great about what we accomplished together - not extracted from with nothing left. I want to finish a year and feel like I can rest for a minute, rather than feel like I have to fight to protect any time off (if I can even win that battle). I want to finish a year and feel like I can rest, reflect, and integrate - not crash into the floor, dissolve into a puddle, and question whether I can do this all again.
I know so many people who left formal educational systems (at all levels) because the system crushed their spirits and they couldn’t take any more. These were wonderful educators - some of the best with so much to give - and yet they each reached a breaking point where they couldn’t take it anymore.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Other worlds are possible - other forms of teaching and learning and mentorship and scholarship are possible that uplift rather than crush the people working within them.
I yearn and long for a system that values our labor, our work, our presence, that values everything we bring to the spaces we are in - not just the classroom, but the hallway interactions, the meetings, the text exchanges, even the meals or coffees we share with students past and present. The accompaniment. I want a system that treasures us instead of treating us like we’re disposable.
Nothing and no one is disposable in a finite, closed system- an ecosystem. I yearn for a learning ecosystem that values each member of the community for what they bring, that is regenerative and autopoeitic, creating conditions for all of life to thrive.
I want better for our students. My daughter. I want her to be excited about how she spends each day, never to say, “School is hell,” and to know she is right, but not to have any other options for her right now.
“I have to teach tomorrow,” I tell her one evening, explaining why we can’t go out. The year is over, but I’m teaching a two-week summer program.
“I hate when you teach!” she yelled from the backseat of the car. “You don’t have time to do anything else!”
She’s right. The format of teaching intensives is demanding: early starts, hours of teaching, followed by afternoons of meetings and evenings of prepping. I’ve tried to get better about not carrying prepping into the evening, but it is all-consuming. If these systems aren’t serving educators or students, who are they serving?
And at the end of the year, I feel like I’ve been consumed. Eaten alive.
What if I let myself be consumed, I wonder? Everything is food, and at the end of the day, we are all eating or being eaten. As Perdita Finn writes in her most recent book, Mothers of Magic:
“We are all consuming each other, feeding each other, and becoming one another - world without end, life without end, love it does not end. So be it.”2
This is interbeing. What would it mean to allow myself to be consumed? To become food and turn into something new?
I want to become excrement that nourishes the forest.
I want to become fodder for the leaf-cutter ants to carry away.
If the academy is going to consume me, maybe I should let it, and shit me out, and be reborn through the cycle of metabolism as something more magnificent than I could have ever imagined before.
I imagine allowing myself to be consumed, swallowed like a snake eats its prey. I dissolve in the snake’s belly, becoming snake. Shedding its skin. Slowly dying by the roots of a tree, to return to the forest floor.
Maybe it is the fighting being consumed that is the exhausting part, the resistance to it. What would it mean to let myself be consumed, to surrender, I wonder?
I want out of this particular food cycle and into another one. I want to be a part of a different metabolic chain.
Wildfires are naturally occurring phenomena that serve to rebalance and regenerate ecosystems. Some fires, though, are not wild, not natural, not regenerative, and do not benefit the whole - fires started by human recklessness and/or exacerbated by human consumption and the effects of climate change and development. Burnout is a fire that is collectively torching us: out of cycle, out of rhythm, leaving nothing left but scorched earth, scorched hearts.
All I know right now is that I am a burnt log, and I need to rest. I still have another week of teaching, and then I will unplug, disconnect, and reconnect with the forest, my own rhythm, my body, with life. As much as possible, I intend to devote my time to slowing down, listening, nourishing, delighting - and writing (which is all of those things to me)3.
I don’t know where I will be on the other side of that, but I trust it deeply. I don’t know who I will be on the other side of that, but I trust her deeply.
After a wildfire, one of the conditions for a superbloom to occur is the presence of prolific seeds. I know I have been planting seeds steadily, diligently, and caringly for a long time. Maybe, after the rain and the rest, these seeds will have the conditions to germinate and bloom. Maybe the fire will be regenerative after all. We will see what takes root. I will keep asking the seeds what conditions they need.
Time will tell. Time for Log Girl Summer.
Lots of love,
Stephanie
Sophie Strand, Make Me Good Soil
Perdita Finn (2026), Mothers of Magic, p. 17.
I have no less than 26 drafts going right now. Stay tuned ;)
To comment on maybe letting the system eat you and digest you perhaps into something new: There’s a Japanese technique called Shou Sugi Ban where wood is purposefully charred so that it becomes resistant to pests, mold, rot, and I think also water. It creates very beautiful structures. You can intently turn yourself into a burning log as a practice as well. (Also, if the log is still hot, I think hot girl summer still stands).
Thank you for your gifted gift