You Can Have My Labor, But Not My Soul: Moral Resilience in Higher Ed
A wordless reflection on the difference between offering your work and giving yourself away.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the weight people carry in higher education. Not just the obvious weight of deadlines, meetings, grading, grant cycles, strategic plans, and inboxes that reproduce overnight like emotionally needy gremlins. I mean the quieter weight. The weight of knowing what you believe in, what you came here to do, what you hoped education could be, and then finding yourself inside systems that don’t always make room for that kind of care.
A lot of us entered education because we believed in something. Access. Transformation. Equity. Open knowledge. The possibility that learning can change a life. The simple but radical act of helping someone feel capable, seen, and supported. And then, somewhere along the way, we find ourselves sitting in rooms where the language says “student success,” but the decision doesn’t feel like care. Or where the mission says equity, but the process is quietly harming the very people it claims to serve. Or where our own boundaries are treated as a problem to manage instead of a condition for sustainable work.
That gap between what we believe and what we’re often asked to participate in is where a different kind of exhaustion lives.
In the literature, this is often called moral injury.
In everyday higher ed life, sometimes we just call it Tuesday.
But I’ve been thinking about another concept too: moral resilience.
Not as a cute rebrand of burnout. Not as another way to tell people to be tougher, bounce back, or find a better morning routine. I mean moral resilience as the practice of staying connected to your integrity when the system around you keeps asking you to disconnect from it.
The Quiet Ache of Moral Injury
For a long time, I didn’t have language for this specific kind of exhaustion. It’s not regular stress. It’s not just being busy. It’s not solved by a planner, a better calendar, or one more webinar about self-care. It’s the ache that comes from watching decisions get made for metrics, optics, budgets, rankings, compliance, or convenience, while knowing there are real people on the other side of those decisions.
It’s the discomfort of feeling complicit in something that doesn’t align with your values. It’s the grief of realizing that an institution you cared about may not be able, or willing, to care back in the way you needed it to. Moral injury can show up when contingent faculty are treated as endlessly replaceable, when staff are expected to absorb impossible workloads with gratitude, when students are discussed as retention numbers before they’re discussed as people, when accessibility is treated as an exception instead of a design responsibility, or when someone’s exhaustion is interpreted as lack of commitment instead of evidence that the system is asking too much.
And it can show up in smaller ways too. In the meeting where you know something is wrong but don’t feel safe enough to say it. In the moment when you soften your language so much that your truth almost disappears. In the email you send that technically says the right thing but leaves your body buzzing because you know the process itself is harmful.
That kind of exhaustion doesn’t stay neatly contained in a job description. Work is not our only life. Higher ed is not our only home. Our bodies, families, nervous systems, relationships, finances, houses, griefs, hopes, and daily messes come with us. We don’t set them down at the edge of campus or leave them outside the Zoom room. We carry all of it.
I’ve been learning that in a very literal way lately. I stepped away from my role as Open Education Librarian at a large R1 university in Texas because I had to choose my health, and I did. It wasn’t simple, and it wasn’t easy, but it was right. Around the same time, I started The Open Practice Academy, a new space for helping educators, libraries, community colleges, small programs, and mission-driven teams turn values like access, care, affordability, and accessibility into real, sustainable practice. And then, because apparently life enjoys a heavy-handed metaphor, a small bathroom issue flooded the first floor of our house and temporarily displaced our family of five, plus six pets, while the lower half of our home gets renovated.
So yes, I’ve been thinking about rebuilding.
Not in the abstract. Not as a cute leadership metaphor floating in the sky somewhere. I mean rebuilding while living out of bags, managing kids and pets and contractors, starting a business, beginning a PhD, and trying to stay connected to hope without pretending any of this is easy. I mean rebuilding when the old structure is no longer available, the new one isn’t finished yet, and you still have to figure out where everyone is sleeping tonight.
That feels like life right now.
And honestly, it feels like higher ed too.
What I Mean by Moral Resilience
If moral injury is the wound, moral resilience is the practice of tending to the wound without letting it become your whole identity. Cynda Rushton has written about moral resilience in healthcare, but the concept feels deeply relevant to education too, especially now. Moral resilience isn’t about becoming invincible. Honestly, I don’t trust leadership models that require people to become invincible.
That’s usually just exploitation wearing a blazer.
Moral resilience is about building the internal, relational, and practical supports that help us stay connected to our values when the work gets complicated. It asks different questions than burnout culture usually asks. Not just, “How do I keep going?” But how do I keep going without becoming numb? How do I stay honest without becoming consumed by anger? How do I make ethical choices when I don’t have full power? How do I protect my integrity in rooms where I may not be able to change the whole outcome? How do I stay soft enough to care, but supported enough not to collapse?
That’s the part I keep coming back to. Moral resilience doesn’t ask us to deny the injury. It asks us to stay in relationship with our own humanity while we decide what comes next.
Integrity in the Messy Middle
We often talk about integrity like it’s clean and obvious. You either have it or you don’t. But most real leadership doesn’t happen in clean conditions. It happens in the messy middle, where the choices are constrained, the power is uneven, the timeline is unreasonable, and everyone is pretending the spreadsheet has no emotional consequences.
Integrity, at least for me, has become less about purity and more about alignment. It’s the practice of telling the truth, first to yourself. It’s being able to say, “This decision may be final, but I won’t pretend it’s harmless.” Or, “I may not be able to change this entire system today, but I can still reduce harm where I have influence.” Or, “I can be professional without becoming dishonest.” Or, “I can stay kind without making myself smaller.”
There’s something deeply stabilizing about refusing to participate in the performance that everything is fine when everything is not fine.
Sometimes integrity is a big public stand. But a lot of the time, it’s quieter than that. It’s documenting what happened. It’s asking the question no one wants to ask. It’s naming the human impact. It’s choosing not to dress up harm in strategic language. It’s saying, “I need to think about that,” instead of offering instant agreement.
It’s staying connected to your own knowing.
Self-Stewardship Isn’t Selfish
One of the things I keep learning, and relearning, and apparently learning again because I’m stubborn, is that you can’t build humane systems while treating yourself like a disposable resource. That doesn’t work. You can’t care-design your way into sustainability if your own life is running on fumes.
You can’t be the bridge, the translator, the strategist, the advocate, the calm one, the creative one, the one who holds the emotional weather of the room, and never ask what all of that holding is costing you. In my work, I often talk about care-centered workflows and human-centered implementation. But I’m also learning that those ideas have to include the person designing and facilitating the work.
The softness we offer other people has to belong to us too.
That’s not indulgent. It’s ethical.
Self-stewardship is not abandoning the work. It’s refusing to let the work consume the worker. It might look like boundaries. It might look like rest. It might look like telling the truth about capacity. It might look like building slower processes because the fast ones keep breaking people. It might look like designing professional learning that doesn’t require panic, performance, or perfection. It might look like admitting, “I care deeply about this, and I also can’t carry it alone.”
That sentence alone could probably save a few people.
Moral Agency in Small Places
One thing I appreciate about moral resilience is that it doesn’t require us to pretend we have more power than we do. That matters because a lot of people in higher education are leading without formal authority. Staff lead. Librarians lead. Instructional designers lead. Faculty lead from the margins. Students lead. Care workers lead. The people closest to the harm are often the people with the least institutional power to stop it.
So moral resilience can’t only be about grand gestures. It also has to be about moral agency in small places. Choosing an open educational resource because you know the textbook cost matters. Making a process clearer because confusion has a cost. Building an accessible template instead of treating access as an afterthought. Advocating for a colleague in the meeting after they leave the room. Refusing to make people feel foolish for not knowing something yet. Creating a learning experience where people can breathe.
These things may seem small, but small is not the same as insignificant.
Sometimes small ethical actions are how we remind ourselves that we’re not powerless.
Rebuilding as a Leadership Practice
I used to think rebuilding meant something had gone wrong. And sometimes, yes, rebuilding does begin because something broke. A role ends. A body says no. A system reveals what it can’t hold. A house floods. A floor comes up. The cabinets go. The furniture goes. The plan disappears.
But I’m starting to understand rebuilding differently.
Rebuilding is also where we get to ask better questions. What do we actually need now? What was only there because it had always been there? What can we make more accessible? What can we make lighter? What can we stop carrying? What kind of structure would support the life we’re actually living, not the one we were pretending we could maintain?
That’s true in a house. It’s true in a career. It’s true in higher education. And it’s true in the work of open practice.
A lot of my work has been about helping people move from values to structures. Not just saying we care about access, but designing for it. Not just saying we believe in affordability, but changing the materials, processes, and support systems that make learning possible. Not just saying we value educators, but building professional learning that doesn’t quietly depend on their exhaustion.
Rebuilding asks us to be honest about what was never sustainable in the first place.
That honesty can be painful.
It can also be freeing.
Because when something has to be rebuilt, we don’t have to recreate the exact thing that broke us. We can choose differently. We can build with more care. We can make the pathways wider. We can leave room for actual humans to live there.
Thinking Out Loud From the PhD Side of Things
As I begin my PhD in Leadership and Change, I keep noticing how much leadership education focuses on technical competence. Budgets. Strategy. Assessment. Organizational change. Communication. Program design. All of that matters. But I’m also interested in the moral and emotional reality of leadership.
What happens when the strategy is technically sound but ethically thin? What happens when the institution says it values care, but the people doing care work are exhausted, under-supported, or invisible? What happens when the leader isn’t the person with the title, but the person holding the relationships, translating the chaos, and making the work survivable?
Who teaches us how to survive the heartbreak of leadership failure?
Who teaches us how to lead when the system no longer seems to recognize the humans inside it?
I don’t have all the answers. I’m very much thinking out loud here. But I do know this: moral resilience is not about becoming less affected. I think it’s about becoming more rooted. More honest. More connected. More able to tell the difference between discomfort that helps us grow and harm that asks us to disappear.
Refusing to Let the Work Take Your Soul
There’s a line I keep returning to in my own life and work:
You can have my labor, but you cannot have my soul.
That may sound dramatic, but honestly, higher ed has earned a little drama. Because so much of the work asks people to give more than their job description ever named. More time. More emotional labor. More flexibility. More patience. More loyalty. More hope.
And for people who care deeply, the danger isn’t that we don’t care enough. The danger is that we care so much we forget we’re also people.
Moral resilience, to me, is a refusal. A refusal to become numb. A refusal to confuse overextension with commitment. A refusal to let institutional urgency replace human wisdom. A refusal to keep calling something sustainable when it depends on someone quietly falling apart.
It’s also a return. A return to our values. A return to our bodies. A return to relationships that remind us we’re not machines. A return to the kind of work that feels aligned, not because it’s easy, but because it doesn’t require us to abandon ourselves.
Leading With a Human Heart
If you’re feeling the weight right now, I want to say this clearly: you’re not weak for feeling exhausted by ethical tension. You’re not dramatic for noticing harm. You’re not unprofessional for needing boundaries. You’re not failing because you can’t keep absorbing the impossible with a smile.
You’re human.
And maybe the next step isn’t managing your burnout more efficiently. Maybe the next step is protecting your integrity more intentionally. That might mean changing how you work. It might mean changing what you agree to. It might mean finding people who can tell the truth with you. It might mean building systems that don’t require heroics. It might mean letting gentleness become part of the infrastructure, not just something we offer after harm has already happened.
That’s the kind of work I want to keep building through The Open Practice Academy: open, humane, values-aligned professional learning that helps people build better systems without losing themselves inside the process. Not perfect systems. Not shiny systems. Human ones. The kind where people can learn, reflect, build, question, revise, and still stay whole.
As I continue my PhD and this new season of work, I’m trying to practice leadership as a form of presence. Not performance. Not perfection. Presence. The kind that tells the truth. The kind that notices who’s carrying too much.
The kind that can celebrate the wins without pretending the losses didn’t happen. The kind that remembers that people are not problems to solve.
They’re people to care with.
And if no one has told you this lately:
You deserve gentleness too.
Author’s Note on Process and Artwork
This piece, like much of my work, came together through a mix of lived experience, reflection, research, notes, and visual meaning-making. I use Notion and Notion AI as part of my everyday thinking and writing process. Notion is where I keep notes, memories, journals, research, project ideas, drafts, fragments, and the thousands of small connections that would otherwise disappear into the fog. It’s my second brain in the most literal sense.
For me, these tools are not just productivity tools. They’re part of how I accommodate my own executive function needs. They help me organize what I know, remember what matters, and return to ideas that might otherwise stay locked behind overwhelm, fatigue, or too many competing thoughts at once. A lot of the stories and ideas I care most about are already there. Tools like Notion help me find them, shape them, and bring them forward.
The artwork in this post was created through collaboration with Lovart.ai, guided by my own ideation, quotes, visual direction, and brand aesthetic. I developed the concepts, selected the language, shaped the symbolism, and directed the overall tone: soft, human, grounded, a little tender, and a little too real. The visuals are not meant to replace the writing, but to extend it. They help hold the feeling of the piece in another form.
I believe creative tools can be part of access. They can help us tell the stories we might not otherwise have the capacity, clarity, or energy to tell alone. For me, that matters. Because the point is not to make the process look effortless. The point is to make meaning possible.
A note on language: In this piece, I’m drawing from scholarship on moral injury, moral distress, and moral resilience, especially the work of Jonathan Shay, Brett Litz and colleagues, Andrew Jameton, and Cynda Rushton. I’m using those concepts reflectively here to think about higher education, care work, leadership, and the personal cost of values-based work.
Further Reading
Jameton, A. (1984). Nursing Practice: The Ethical Issues. Prentice-Hall.
Litz, B. T., Stein, N., Delaney, E., Lebowitz, L., Nash, W. P., Silva, C., & Maguen, S. (2009). Moral injury and moral repair in war veterans: A preliminary model and intervention strategy. Clinical Psychology Review, 29(8), 695–706.
Rushton, C. H. (2018). Moral Resilience: Transforming Moral Suffering in Healthcare. Oxford University Press.
Shay, J. (1994). Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Scribner.