Today, my head feels like a pressure cooker. I can feel it just behind my eyes—the accumulation of conflicts resolved, arguments interrupted, small eruptions contained before they could spread across the room. So much of teaching is invisible labor: the endless balancing act of keeping a space safe, steady, and directed toward the fragile goal of graduation. On the outside, the room might appear calm. Inside, however, I carry the hum of pressure.
A Study of Pain captures this paradox with unsettling clarity. A man stands sealed inside a glass box, flames curling around his body, watched by a silent audience. He is at once exposed and confined, burning yet unconsumed. That image resonates with the lived reality of teaching. We stand in the center of attention, carrying the heat of conflict and expectation, but must keep it contained, held back from overwhelming the very students who surround us.
The glass itself becomes a psychological metaphor. It shields the audience from the fire, but it also traps the one inside. Teachers often live within this dual reality: protectors of a space yet prisoners of its emotional intensity. In psychology, D.W. Winnicott spoke of the caregiver as a “holding environment”—a presence strong enough to absorb another’s chaos so that the vulnerable person can feel secure enough to grow. Teachers provide this daily. We hold space for students’ anger, grief, and confusion, absorbing their turbulence so they might have room to learn. But that holding takes a toll. The fire burns somewhere, and often it burns within us.
Modern psychology names these costs. “Burnout” is the exhaustion that comes from prolonged emotional labor, the depletion of empathy after carrying too much for too long. “Secondary trauma” describes the wounds we acquire when we witness the pain of others day after day, until their trauma becomes lodged within our own nervous systems. Both haunt the profession. We stand inside the glass box not only with our own flames, but with the borrowed flames of our students flickering around us.
Kierkegaard once described anxiety as “the dizziness of freedom.” Teaching holds this same vertigo. We have immense freedom to shape a classroom, yet carry dizzying responsibility for every word spoken, every silence held, every gesture misread. Camus offers a counterweight: “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” Perhaps resilience, in this sense, is not the absence of fire but the willingness to remain with it—transforming it into something bearable, even illuminating.
The image of the audience unsettles me most. They watch, silent and still. Do my students see the pressure I contain, the fire I hold back for their sake? Or do they experience only the light that reaches them through the glass? Perhaps this is as it should be. Winnicott’s “good enough” parent or teacher does not reveal the full weight of their effort but provides a stable presence from which others can take risks. My labor, then, is not always to be seen, but to ensure that others feel safe enough to begin seeing themselves.
To teach is to endure paradox. It is to carry heat yet radiate calm. To absorb chaos yet model order. To burn silently so that others may find light. Teaching is not only the transmission of knowledge but the psychological alchemy of pressure into possibility. And though the cost is real—burnout, exhaustion, the ache of silence—there is also deep meaning in the endurance. Each day within the glass is a reminder that resilience can itself be a form of wisdom, and that through our quiet presence, students may learn not how to avoid fire, but how to stand within it without being consumed.