To teach is to bleed

 

Meingel Damayon 

I woke up choking on blood.

I barely made it out of bed; a thick, watery clump just poured out of my mouth. Red. So much red. My head spun hard, legs shaking, scared I’d collapse right there on the floor with my own blood staring back at me. I’m scared of seeing my own blood. I glanced at the wall clock: past 1 a.m.

Two hours until I had to leave for practice teaching.

Suddenly, the blood didn’t scare me anymore. What scared me was the thought of standing in front of class half-sleep, voice cracking, dizzy, blanking out while students watched. I was more afraid of being late, teaching ineffectively, than the fact that I just puked a scary amount of blood.

I know I’m not sick. I feel no pain anywhere else. But at that moment, my body spoke in a language my mind had been refusing to hear. There’s no time to be tired, no time to be broken, I don’t have time to fall apart. So I wiped my mouth, rinsed the sink, and went back to bed as if nothing had happened.

That morning, I learned the first real lesson of teaching: sometimes the blood comes out of your mouth, and you still have to smile by 5:50 a.m. and pretend you are whole.

I’m still learning the same lesson, in slower, quieter ways. Not a single day has passed that I haven’t asked myself: What does it truly mean to teach?

Is it just ticking boxes on a curriculum guide? Marching through lesson plans like a soldier on parade? Is greatness measured in titles, ranks, extra duties, the dryness of your throat from back-to-back classes, and exhaustion in your bones? These questions will not leave me alone. Some nights I beg them to stop.

I am sick of teachers being called heroes, of the profession dressed up in gold stars and martyrdom quotes. I am tired of pretending the exhaustion is holy. I am sick of hearing “This is just how teaching is” when everyone knows the pay is pitiful, the classrooms are ovens, the paperwork is endless, and the system could be fixed but isn’t—because it counts on our patience, on our guilt, on the fact that we will keep showing up anyway.

Teaching demands pieces of your body and soul, and the system knows exactly how to take them. We hate ourselves for still walking through the gate every morning, because somewhere inside, we still believe one child might be worth the cost. I know one person cannot fix a broken system, cannot rewrite policies written, cannot carry every child across every finish line. And still, I bleed.

Three months of practice teaching felt like three lifetimes. Before they pinned the “Pre-Service Teacher” badge on me, I sat through the seminar like a convict waiting for the sentence. I had fought this degree for years, convinced teaching had chosen the wrong heart. I was tired, broke, just trying to survive the program. Deep inside, I was desperately and quietly begging the universe to change my heart and mind. I was pleading, or at least to make this path make sense, to let me feel, for once, that I belonged here. That, maybe, this is my calling after all.

I walked into those classrooms carrying that fragile hope like a lit candle in a storm. Every day I taught, I bled a little more—quietly, willingly, hopelessly—praying at least one student absorbed something from the lesson I had lost sleep preparing. The raw, burning dryness in my throat after five straight periods, the nights my mind raced while I prepared every slide, the dread that it still wouldn’t be enough.

My professor once said, “A learner must learn from their teacher, but a teacher must also learn from their learners.” This idea resonated deeply with me, becoming a personal mantra for the educator I aspire to be. I once asked each class about their dreams. I’ll never forget how their eyes lit up as they told me what they wanted to be and why. In those moments, I saw my younger self in them—full of color, hope, and a wide-open view of the world. Yet every time they spoke, a quiet part of me ached, knowing that in this broken system, many of those dreams would fade or become almost impossible to chase. The old battle between passion and practicality waits for them, too. Still, in that classroom, I let them dream.

And there were days it physically pained me because I couldn’t protect them enough. I’m only one person, and I’m not nearly enough. Some nights, I wished I were selfless enough to dedicate my entire life to them. I would, if I could. I’m not selfless enough to sacrifice everything this path demands.

To teach is to be wounded every day by a system that piles on impossible workloads; to teach is to stay passionate and dedicated enough to make sure real learning happens. It demands the sacrifice of your very soul—your time, your sanity, your identity. Teaching isn’t just exhaustion; it’s a slow, agonizing bleed—your mind, your emotions, your spirit dripping away.

And the final, rotten truth I learned: to teach is to bleed, it’s inevitable.