Leaving academia behind

It’s probably no surprise, but you could track my progress as an ex-academic by my book collection.

When I left academia “for good,” I trailed behind me in that monster truck dozens of boxes of academic books. I hadn’t had time to winnow through them in the few weeks between getting a job offer and getting the hell out of Dodge, so I just packed them up and resolved to sort through them when we got settled.

It took me three years to open those boxes again. And in the meantime, they sat against the walls of my dining room (not even the basement!) as a visible reminder of all of the time, effort, and money I turned my back on when I turned my back on that career. As you might imagine, I don’t recommend this.

Eventually, though, my desire for a pretty (and useable!) dining room outweighed my resistance to opening up those Pandora’s boxes, and I sat down one rainy Saturday determined to end with Order. At the end of that day, I had a short shelf of books neatly leaning against each other and bag after bag after bag of books to donate to the AAUW booksale.

I had to confront the fact that I hadn’t left academia very far behind. I’d simply stacked it around my dining room. And the thought that kept going through my mind as I opened all of those boxes and scanned all of those spines was this: This isn’t me. Those composition books? Not me. Professional writing books? Not me. Modernist literature? Definitely not me.

It was incredibly freeing. None of those, really, had ever been me, and letting them go — letting go of the me that had them in her collection — meant there was room for the me who loved psychology and personality and Eastern philosophy and non-fiction about crazy things like how paint colors were discovered and developed (dead bugs for red, in fact).

It meant I could love A History of the Modern Fact and Simians, Cyborgs, and Women for themselves, because I enjoyed reading them and because I liked the part of me who liked reading them. It meant I could reclaim my intellectual curiosity instead of my intellectual pose — and the curiosity was much more fun.

And so I purged the collection of all of those disciplines, all of those scholars, who no longer compelled me. It felt like freedom, like I was finally washing my hands of the struggle, of those years when I couldn’t rub the misfitting edges of myself off fast enough.

But that wasn’t the end of it. A few years later, we started winnowing through things again, this time to pare down, have more space, and get rid of anything we didn’t either love or use. And I found myself getting rid of fiction.

Now, your experience in graduate school may well have been different, but I ran with a self-consciously pomo crowd, people who only liked music if no one had heard of it, people who read Jonathan Lethem before watching Space Ghost Coast to Coast. I didn’t really fit in.

It’s not that I didn’t like those things — I did. But I liked them with my head, not with my gut. Left to my own devices, I liked predictable melodies and romantic comedies and novels about people.

As I came across them all again, I realized that I’m unlikely to read those books or watch those movies again. I’m no longer satisfied by things that feed only my mind — I want things that feed my soul. Me, I’d rather read about the experiences of spiritual mystics or good management theory or how to hack SEO or someone’s personal account of mental illness. And so they, too, got packed into bags and boxes and summarily evicted from my shelves.

What I learned from my book collection was this: leaving academia is a process. Because it’s so much a part of our identities, because so many of us experienced graduate school in the impressionable decade of our twenties, because it took so damn long, turning in your office key isn’t the end of it. There will be layers and layers of untying identities, of examining assumptions, of watching yourself bloom. And that’s okay. It’s better than okay, in fact — it’s magical.

So if you’ve got boxes of books stacked around your own dining room — literally or metaphorically — know that it’s okay. Know that you’re on your way, that you’re right where you’re supposed to be, that it will be different one day. You’ll reclaim your dining room and your bookshelf both.

But in the meantime, be right where you are, whether it’s grief or anger or confusion or avoidance. It’s all part of the journey. And it’s all good.