Why do I cry in my car every day after school?

Here is what is actually happening: you walk into a room every day knowing less than you will know next year, and you judge yourself as though you should already know it now. That is not honesty. That is cruelty dressed up as high standards. No one asks a soldier in his first battle to fight like a veteran of twenty campaigns. You would call that unjust. Yet you demand of yourself, in your first year, the steadiness of a teacher who has stood in that room for a decade. The gap you feel is not proof of failure. It is proof you are new. You were not made to carry this judgment alone, and you should not try. Bring your actual day — the one lesson that landed, the one that didn't — to the people doing this work beside you. Let them tell you what a first year looks like, because you cannot see your own shape from inside it.