From the Classroom to the Cause: How Three Careers Taught Me What Calling Collapse Really Means
From Burnout to Calling Collapse: How a Winding Career Path Revealed What Actually Breaks the Spirit of Helping Professionals
I did not set out to become an expert on workplace wellbeing. I became one by living through nearly every version of it.
My career does not follow a straight line, and for years I thought that was a liability. I spent four years teaching general and special education in the small schools around Grant County, Indiana. Before that, and alongside it in different seasons of my life, I logged ten years in hospital environmental services. I spent three years as a vocational rehabilitation counselor, working as a state government employee with FSSA Area 10, helping individuals with vision impairments find their way into meaningful work and postsecondary education. Later, I moved into state government, serving as a Special Education Specialist with the Indiana Department of Education, where I supported superintendents and special education directors across all 425 of Indiana's local education agencies on compliance, alternate assessment, and policy.
Ten years in healthcare. Seven years in education. Three years in vocational rehabilitation. On paper, it looks like restlessness. In practice, it was something else entirely.
Every one of those roles put me next to people who cared deeply about their work and were quietly falling apart because of it. Teachers who loved their students but had nothing left to give by October. Hospital staff who showed up shift after shift long after the job had taken more than it gave back. Counselors and specialists doing everything right and still feeling like they were failing the people who needed them most.
For a long time, everyone around me called this burnout. I called it that too, until my doctoral research told me otherwise.
While earning my PhD in Educational Leadership at the University of the Cumberlands, I studied teacher attrition through a quantitative lens, surveying hundreds of helping professionals. What I found did not match the standard burnout narrative. Burnout is real, and it is exhaustion. It is adjustable. You can rest, recalibrate, and find your footing again. But there was another pattern showing up in the data, one that looked similar on the surface but was fundamentally different underneath. It was not exhaustion. It was moral injury, and it hurts your calling.
I started calling it Calling Collapse.
Calling Collapse happens when the values that drew someone into a helping profession—teaching, nursing, social work, counseling—come into direct conflict with the systems they work inside. It is not "I am tired." It is "I do not know who I am outside of this work anymore," or "I became a teacher to help people, and I cannot." Burnout can shift with rest. Moral injury does not level out the same way. The beam stays bent until someone names what actually broke it.
I built a framework around that distinction, grounded in Bandura's self-efficacy theory and Herzberg's motivation theory, and I have spent the years since taking it into districts, hospitals, and organizations across the country. Not as someone lecturing from a stage about wellness, but as someone who has clocked the hours in classrooms and hospital corridors and government offices, who has felt the specific weight of caring about work that keeps asking for more than it gives back.
That winding career path I once saw as a liability turned out to be the entire point. I could not have identified Calling Collapse from inside a single profession. I needed ten years in healthcare to see the pattern in nursing staff, seven years in education to see it in teachers, three years in vocational rehabilitation to see it in counselors, and a season in state government to see how policy and systems shape all of it from above.
I am a mom of two, stepmom to five, grandmother to ten, and a military spouse who shares a home in rural Indiana with six dogs and roughly eighty chickens. I did not arrive at this work through a straight professional climb. I arrived at it through every job that asked me to care past the point of sustainability, and through finally having the data and the language to explain why.
That is the work I do now. Not fixing burnout. Naming what actually happened, so the people carrying it can finally feel seen.
