I used to love this job. I really did.

I’m Nina. I’m 41. I’ve been teaching in Thailand for almost a decade, and for most of that time, I felt like I had found my place. I loved the routine of school life - the bell ringing, the chatter of students in the hallway, the little chaos and joy of the classroom. Even the heat didn’t bother me after a while.

And then came COVID.

At first, I was one of the optimistic ones. “We’ll get through this,” I told my colleagues. “It’ll be temporary.”  Then one month turned into two. Then six. Then a full year of online teaching. Then another. Then hybrid. Then chaos. And somewhere in that blur of Google Classrooms, Zoom links, and Line group hellscapes, something in me broke. I didn’t hate my students. I didn’t even hate the job. I started to hate myself.

The person I became during online teaching wasn’t a teacher, it was a ghost. A glitchy face in a tiny square, begging teenagers to turn on their cameras. A PowerPoint-reading, WiFi-buffering, soul-draining automaton trying to force engagement through emojis and quizzes.

“Good morning, class!”

Silence.

“Can anyone hear me?”

Silence.

“Please type ‘yes’ if you can hear me.”

Three thumbs-up. Out of 48 students.

By the third month, I was waking up with anxiety that made me physically sick. I would stare at the screen for hours, talking to myself, watching as students logged in just long enough to mark attendance, then vanished into TikTok or sleep. I tried everything - games, music, breakout rooms, Kahoot, Edmodo, puppets, freaking puppets - and nothing worked. I started to feel like I was performing CPR on a corpse. A digital corpse that didn’t even know I was trying to save it.

No one talks about the mental toll that took on us. The isolation. The guilt. The feeling of complete failure. The quiet shame of knowing you’re trying your best but making zero impact. And worst of all? The knowledge that no one really cared.

Administrators? Still demanding reports, still blaming us for “low engagement.”

Parents? Angry when their kids failed, as if I could teach grammar through a mute button.

Other teachers? Also drowning, but too exhausted to support each other.

And me? Crying in the bathroom between classes, then logging in with a smile so I wouldn’t scare the kids.

When we finally returned to in-person teaching, I thought I’d feel better. But I didn’t. I felt numb. I looked around the staff room and realized how many great teachers had quit. Just quietly disappeared. No goodbye parties, just burnout and silence.

That’s the real aftermath of online teaching: a lost generation of teachers. We’re still here, but not really. Our spark? Gone. Our joy? On life support. I still show up, still do my job, but I don’t feel like me anymore.

So yeah, teaching online broke me. And I’m still trying to put the pieces back together.

If you’re reading this and feeling the same, you’re not alone. And if you’re a school leader reading this? Please acknowledge the trauma. Offer support. Be human. Because we’re not okay. And pretending we are just to keep the machine running?

That’s what made me stop loving this job.

Nina